WML 150 years - National Museums · PDF fileHis father introduced him to the Zoological Society of London and the teenage Thomas Moore was employed in their zoo on his fatherÕs recommendation

Liverpool’s museum:the first 150 years

National Museums Liverpool

April 2010

Liverpool’s museum: the first 150 years

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The 150 years that led from a little museum on a side street in Liverpool to thepresent World Museum have no little drama in them, and contain someremarkable characters who lived and worked in remarkable times.

Liverpool’s museum is the oldest of the museums and galleries operated byNational Museums Liverpool, and is one of the great museums of the Britishregions. Its story reflects Liverpool’s rise to become one of the world’s greattrading cities and an awesome dip in its fortunes during the twentieth century.The museum was born in halcyon days of confidence when the British Empirestraddled the globe and Liverpool was a centre of worldwide trade. It sufferedmassive destruction in the Second World War. After the war, years of increasingdesperation were followed by uncertain and painful recovery and nationalisation.

Along the way the museum spawned great institutions in Liverpool, the WalkerArt Gallery, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the Museum of Liverpool. Itemerged in the twenty-first century with a new name, World Museum, thatsignalled a return to its earliest and most enduring ambitions - taking visitors’attention away from their immediate surroundings to look outwards at lifesciences, earth sciences and human cultures around the world.

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The museum’s name changed numerous times, and so in this story it is usuallyjust called ‘the museum’ or ‘Liverpool’s museum’.

Many thanks are due to the people who helped with this text. They helped to getit right. Where it’s wrong, that’ll be my bit.

John Millard3 April 2010


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Contents

PageIntroduction 2Contents 3Chapter 1 1850-1853 The Derby Museum 4Chapter 2 1853-1860 William Brown 14Chapter 3 1860–1890 The new museum 23Chapter 4 1890–1898 Electric catfish 33Chapter 5 1896–1918 Horseshoe galleries 38Chapter 6 1919–1940 Experiments 46Chapter 7 1941-1949 Bombed-out 58Chapter 8 1950-1955 Closed 66Chapter 9 1955-1971 Rebuilding 73Chapter 10 1972-1993 Expanding 82Chapter 11 1990-1997 More experiments and expansion 92Chapter 12 1997-2001 Highs and lows 104Chapter 13 2001-2008 Capital of Culture 113Illustrations 123

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Chapter 1 – 1850-1853 – The Derby Museum

Thomas John Moore was a modest and unassuming man. He was conscientious,unpretentious, retiring, and ‘of a highly nervous disposition’1. He came toLiverpool at a time when it was full of daring entrepreneurs. Members of itspowerful elite brought him to the town and selected him to set up and run itsfirst public museum. He saw the town grow at a frantic speed and claim to be thesecond city of the British Empire. But somehow he managed to claim that his lifewas ‘specially quiet, simple and uneventful’2.

Moore was born in London in 1824 and inherited his father’s interest in naturalhistory. His father introduced him to the Zoological Society of London and theteenage Thomas Moore was employed in their zoo on his father’srecommendation. Opening in 1828, it was the first public zoo in the world, and itcarries on today as London Zoo in Regent’s Park. There Moore came to theattention of the 13th Earl of Derby. The Earl of Derby was an enthusiastic naturalhistorian, and was president of the Zoological Society. When he inherited his titleon his father’s death in October 1834, he set out on grand plans to create amenagerie and zoological collection at Knowsley Hall, the family seat some eightmiles to the east of Liverpool.

In 1843, when Moore was still a teenager, Lord Derby invited him to work in themenagerie he was creating on his estate at Knowsley. The Earl’s collection of liveanimals rivalled any in the world, and he built up fine collections of naturalhistory books, drawings and preserved specimens. The books, drawings andmuseum specimens were kept in Knowsley Hall, while a hundred acres of thepark at Knowsley were dedicated to exotic birds, mammals, reptiles and fish. Inorder that some of them could roam free the Earl had a ten mile wall builtaround the park.

Private zoos were fashionable among aristocrats and showmen at the time.Before the 13th Earl embarked on his works at Knowsley, his father had an aviarythere and kept ornamental pheasants and songbirds. Another private zoo, thebrainchild of Thomas Atkins, was nearby, in a park on the road to Liverpool inwhat is now an area of housing off the West Derby Road. However Atkins’s

1 1892, ‘The Late Thomas Moore, In Memoriam’, The Liverpool Review, 5 November, p.4.

2 Moore, T.J., 1890. ‘Lord Derby’s Museum (Reminiscences by Mr. T.J. Moore)’. The LiverpoolReview, 8 March, p. 10-11.


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Liverpool Zoological Gardens was not for private contemplation and research.His zoo was open to the public for profit. A guidebook of the time listed some ofits attractions:-

… two beautiful macaws ... a Peruvian Llama ... a playful West Indian goat... three fine pelicans ... two American black bears ... two beautiful zebras ...an American tapir ... the gnu, a lively but vicious animal ... two bears ... fourfine eagles ... a large condor ... a couple of porcupines ... a choice collectionof the feathered tribe … [and] three elephants3.

On Mondays and Fridays during the summer the zoo boasted entertainment fromMr Stubbs’s Band.

Thomas Atkins was a showman with a claim to have been the first in England tobreed ‘ligers’, a cross between lions and tigers. The Earl of Derby eschewed largermammals, especially the big cats, but he exchanged other animals with Atkins.The Earl also bought some animals from dealers, and he employed people tocollect specimens, living or dead. He sent an expedition for three years to SouthAfrica. For several years he sent a collector to the Niger and Senegal, andfinanced two expeditions to Honduras. He was in contact with collectors all overthe world to build up his extraordinary collection.

In the 1840s the Earl decided that the collection of preserved specimens should bekept together and that it should not go to the Zoological Society of London or tothe British Museum. It should stay in Liverpool and become a provincialresource to complement those which were established in the capital. He decidedthat he would leave it to Liverpool’s council, with the proviso that they wouldfind somewhere for it to be housed, and would pay for its upkeep.

When the 13th Earl of Derby died at the end of June 1851, his son, the 14th Earl, setabout clearing his late father’s collection of dead birds and animals from thefamily home and the live exotic animals from the park. The live animals wentfirst. In accordance with his father’s will, Queen Victoria and the ZoologicalSociety of London were given first pick of them. The Queen chose fiveHimalayan pheasants and the Society chose a herd of five Cape Elands(antelopes).

Thomas Moore produced a list of the 1,617 remaining animals and birds in thepark, and his list became the catalogue of an auction sale held a little over three 3 1835. The picture of Liverpool, or, stranger's guide. pp. 215, 217, 218 & 219.


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months after the 13th Earl’s death. Zoos in Amsterdam and Paris bought many ofthe animals and 160 went to the Zoological Society’s zoo in London. Most of theother animals were bought by dealers.

After the Earl of Derby had cleared of his father’s menagerie from the grounds ofKnowsley Hall, his father’s collection of some 20,000 natural history specimensstill remained in the hall. About 19,000 were birds, some 11,000 of which wereprepared for display, and 8,000 of which were study skins. Of the 1,000quadrupeds, the smaller animals were ready to show while the larger animalsmainly remained as skins.

The new Earl had also to decide what to do with Thomas Moore and the rest ofhis father’s staff of curators and zoo keepers. He was energetically involved innational politics and, in a fast-moving political scene, he could not afford to spendtoo much time away from London. He had entered Parliament as a Whig but hadgrown more and more conservative and it was as a Conservative that he wasserving in opposition to the Whig government when his father died. Less thaneight months after his father’s death, the Whig Prime Minister resigned and LordDerby formed a government himself, the first of his three spells as PrimeMinister. The settlement of his father’s estate came in the middle of this busytime, and he was anxious to transfer the collections, and, if possible, ThomasMoore, to the council as fast as decently possible.

In Liverpool a small band of town councillors led by James Allanson Picton,worked hard to oblige the Earl. The energetic Picton was an architect, historian,and member of Liverpool town council for the Lime Street Ward. At councilmeetings Picton spoke on every subject and frequently. He was renowned forarriving late and speaking soon after, and he often left early and spokeimmediately before his departure. He was a passionate campaigner for a libraryand museum.

In April 1850 Picton had proposed to the town council that a committee was setup to prepare for a new library and museum - the Association for the Promotionof a Free Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery. The activity of this committeefell into shadow when the 14th Earl of Derby wrote to the council a fortnight afterhis father’s death. The letter was read out at a special town council meeting on 16July 1851. It announced the old Earl’s wish to give the town his collection.


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A deputation from the council, led by Picton, was sent to meet with the Earl.They returned with the terms for the bequest, including the appointment oftrustees for the museum that he would approve.

The town council set up a Library and Museum Committee with Picton as thechairman. The committee suggested amalgamating the new museum with anexisting Royal Institution Museum and Art Gallery on Colquitt Street near themiddle of the town. The Liverpool Royal Institution had been set up in 1814, andhad opened its museum in 18174. It had a reading room and lecture hall for up to500 people on the ground floor, and museum displays of natural history andsculpture on the floors above. The society received a Royal Charter in 1822 andopened its art gallery on the other side of Colquitt Street in 1843.

Because the Royal Institution had a Royal Charter, an Act of Parliament wasrequired to transfer its collections to the council. Accordingly the LiverpoolRoyal Institution (Transfer of Property) Bill was submitted to Parliament in 1851,and Picton’s Library and Museum Committee worked out the cost of taking overthe Royal Institution Museum and receiving the Earl of Derby’s collection.

One Curator £130.0.0Five Assistants, messengers or porters 120.0.0Coals and gas 40.0.0Insurance 70.0.0Printing and Stationery 15.0.0Cleaning 20.0.0Repairs, painting &c. 100.0.0Petty expenses 20.0.0Allow for expanding or RenewingReplacing, or improving the collections 200.0.05

A building for a new library was offered to the council for £2,500. The UnionNews Room, on the corner of Duke Street and Slater Street, was a few streetsaway from the Royal Institution museum. The Mersey Yacht Club was tenant of

4 Liverpool was not unusual in having a museum set up by a learned society well before thecouncil got involved. For a few years early in the nineteenth century Liverpool also had a privatemuseum of natural history, set up by the showman William Bullock. He opened up on LordStreet first and then on Church Street. Then he moved to London for a brief and spectacular spellon Piccadilly.

5 Manuscript minutes of a meeting of the Library and Museum Committee on 2 September 1851(photocopy in National Museums Liverpool file ‘History of LM Bequest’ 2009).


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the upper room but its members were persuaded to give up their lease, and thecouncil took over the building on 1 November 1851.

With the library question now settled, the Association for the Promotion of a FreePublic Library, Museum and Art Gallery dissolved itself handing over the £1,3892s 10d it had raised and the 4,000 books it had collected to the town council forthe new museum and library. But the matter of a museum was not settled.

The Union News Room building, with alterations, finally cost the council about£3,600, and by October 1851 the Library and Museum Committee had found alibrarian - John Stuart Dalton – who quickly filled the building with booksleaving no room for the museum.

Tripartite negotiations over the museum continued between the Earl of Derby,the Liverpool Royal Institution and the town council, and inevitably ran intodifficulties. The Royal Institution and the Earl of Derby had different ideas aboutwho should be on a board of trustees for the museum. It began to look as if thenew museum would have one set of trustees for the Derby collection and anotherset of trustees for the Liverpool Royal Institution’s collection, and both would beentirely separate from the council’s Library and Museum Committee. The TownClerk had become embroiled in a lengthy exchange of letters with the secretaryof the committee of the Royal Institution.

The Royal Institution called in its solicitors Messrs. Eden and Stanistreet. TheTown Clerk went to meet the solicitors to discuss the bill that had gone toparliament to allow the institution to hand over its collections to the council.They made more and more specific requirements of the council, stipulating thestandards to which the collections and the building should be kept, a guaranteedminimum expenditure, how often their trustees should meet, free entrance, andthe opening times of the museum and library. As the month of December woreon the negotiations between the town council and the Liverpool Royal Institutioncollapsed. The bill to transfer their collections to the town council was withdrawnfrom Parliament.

There was another meeting with Lord Derby in December but it was not longbefore the Earl lost patience. He was anxious that the council appoint a museumcurator and move the collection from Knowsley Hall, so that he could return toLondon where, within two months, he would become Prime Minister in charge ofa new Government. He wrote to the Mayor on Christmas day, and his letter was


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read out at a meeting of the council’s Library and Museum Committee on 30December.

As my time in this part of the country is growing short, I am desirous ofknowing whether the subject of the Derby Museum has yet been broughtbefore the council at large, and whether I may consider the loans agreedto when I had the pleasure of seeing you here, as definitely accepted. Imean more particularly with regard to the appointment of a Curator bythe Council from the names to be recommended by the Trustees. If thatwere so I would take an early opportunity of calling the Trustees togetherand agreeing upon our recommendation, and also on the appointment ofadditional Trustees. As the whole of the live collection is now disposed ofand those engaged in it seeking further situations, and as very extensivechanges in my establishment here are to take place on the 1st of nextmonth, I am desirous that no unnecessary delay should take place in theappointment of a Curator, that the several candidates for the Office mayknow what they have to look to. It would also be convenient, if it bepossible, that the Museum should be removed to Liverpool before mydeparture for the South which will not be later than the 20th of next month.You will therefore I am sure excuse my urging an early and final decisionon the part of the Council and with the compliments of the season…6

The Mayor assured the Earl that any problems in appointing a curator were oflittle importance and the collection could be moved whenever he wished. TheEarl made it known that his favoured candidate to become curator was ThomasMoore, who would shortly be one of those ‘seeking further situations’. Hispowerful recommendation was supported by a batch of testimonials from theBritish Museum and the Zoological Society. The council responded eventually tothe Earl’s desires, and sometime early in 1852 both Thomas Moore and the naturalhistory collections of the 13th Earl of Derby were transferred to the care of thetown council of Liverpool. Moore became first curator of the new museum, and,like the town’s new librarian, was paid £150 a year. The 13th Earl’s magnificentnatural history collections moved from Knowsley Hall to a hastily constructedbrick building behind the new library, on the corner of Slater Street and ParrStreet.

6 Manuscript minutes of a meeting of the Library and Museum Committee on 30 December 1851 -includes a transcription of Lord Derby’s letter of 25 December 1951 (photocopy in NationalMuseums Liverpool file ‘History of LM Bequest’ 2008).


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Meanwhile, on 1 May 1852, just as Lord Derby’s collection was being sorted priorto opening the council’s museum, another museum opened in the town. TheLiverpool jeweller and prolific collector Joseph Mayer opened his EgyptianMuseum. Like the Royal Institution Museum, it was in Colquitt Street and, likethe Royal Institution, Mayer made a charge for entry.

On 3 May 1852 Parliament passed An Act for establishing a Public Library andGallery of Arts at Liverpool, and to make Provision for the Reception of aCollection of Specimens illustrative of Natural History presented by the Earl ofDerby for the Benefit of the Inhabitants of the Borough of Liverpool and theNeighbourhood thereof, and others resorting thereto. The Act gave the towncouncil power to levy a rate of a penny in the pound on all property within theborough for the maintenance of the library, museum and its Botanic Gardens.

The library was opened on the 18 October 1852, with an entrance at the front ofthe building, on Duke Street.

The museum was opened on the 8 March, 1853, by the Mayor of Liverpool,Councillor Samuel Holme. It had an entrance round the side of the building, onSlater Street, where today there is a bricked-up door that was once the originalmuseum entrance.

The opening of the museum was timed to coincide with the celebration of thecentenary of the birth of the late William Roscoe. A successful Liverpool lawyerand radical politician, Roscoe’s interests included history, poetry, languages, artand botany. He established Liverpool’s Botanic Gardens, and campaignedpassionately for the abolition of slavery at a time when the cause was veryunpopular among shipowners and traders in Liverpool. His centenarycelebrations in 1853 almost eclipsed the opening of the museum.

The day’s celebrations began with a ‘breakfast’ in the Philharmonic Hall, in HopeStreet, Liverpool. Joseph Mayer opened his Egyptian Museum for free to holdersof tickets to the Philharmonic Hall event. In the afternoon there was a lecture inthe theatre of the Royal Institution Museum, and in the evening a soirée at theTown Hall.

The museum opening was held between the Roscoe breakfast and the Roscoelecture. The Mayor and the members of the council processed through thestreets from the Town Hall to the museum, arriving at just after 2 o’clock. TheMayor then spoke from a temporary dais in the library, announcing first that he


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had notes from both Lord Derby and from his son Lord Stanley saying thatparliamentary business preventing them from attending. Perhaps it was just aswell because large numbers of people could not be squeezed into the library forthe ceremony. Picton complained in his speech that fitting Lord Derby’scollection into the museum ‘would surpass the accomplishment of any conjurer’7.When the other speeches were finished, the Bishop of Chester was called on tospeak but announced that ‘he little expected to be called upon to do more than bea spectator’. As soon as this farcical opening of the museum finished, a largeparty assembled in the more capacious lecture theatre of the Royal InstitutionMuseum to continue the Roscoe celebrations.

The new council-run museum was named the Derby Museum of the Borough ofLiverpool and attracted 157,861 visits in its first 32 weeks. The museum was openfrom dawn till dusk on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It was closed onSundays, and also on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for cleaning, or forartists and students to visit. As the railway brought more trippers fromneighbouring towns demand for Saturday opening increased to which thecommittee agreed, so that the museum was open four days a week. Entry wasfree and a commentator noted that it was good to see ‘the artisan and his family’enjoying the museum8.

When it first opened the museum was described as consisting of ‘stuffed birds anda large number of birds prepared for stuffing’9. Four rooms on the upper floorwere fitted out with cases that came with Lord Derby’s collection from KnowsleyHall, and two rooms on the ground floor with new cases. On the ground floorwere birds in glass cases and quadrupeds, mainly smaller animals, including aremarkable group of sloths. Upstairs were birds. A Kiwi from New Zealand wasamong the first specimens brought to Europe. When it first arrived it wasthought to be a fake and the skin had to be turned inside out in order to convincea group of naturalists that it was genuine.

But that was not all there was to see.

In the first room there were ten oil paintings by the artist, showman andethnologist, George Catlin. Catlin came to Europe from the USA with a

7 Liverpool Courier, 9 March 1853, p.3.

8 Shimmin, H., 1857. Liverpool Life: Its Pleasures, Practices and Pastimes, 2nd series (reprinted fromthe Liverpool Mercury). ‘The Derby Museum’, chapter X, pp.72-7, p.73.

9 1853. ‘Opening of the Derby Museum.’ Liverpool Courier. 9 March. p.75 (p.3).


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reputation as a painter of the life and customs of the Native American tribes ofthe Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. In Europe his travelling shows hadsuccess and notoriety for more than a decade, but in 1852 he went bankrupt andthe whole of his Native American collection fell into the hands of his creditors.

In the second room on the ground floor were portraits of the founder of themuseum, the 13th Earl, and the current earl, the 14th Earl of Derby. Also on showwere the items that Liverpool council had sent to the Great Exhibition of 1851 inthe Crystal Palace, London - samples of Liverpool’s imports and a large model ofthe docks and the town measuring 15 metres by 21/2 metres. On show nearby wasa model of Liverpool in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Thomas Moore’s reports to the Library and Museum Committee were sparse.They reported the number of visits to the museum and, occasionally, said that hecontinued ’Stuffing Specimens in Store’. In March 1857, in a rare display ofboldness, he asked the committee to authorise him to order three aquarium tanksat the cost of £14 5s 0d. His request was agreed, and Moore embarked on whatwas the second public aquarium in the world. The first had been the Fish Houseat Regent’s Park Zoo established in 1853, and the third, following Moore’saquarium in Liverpool, was the Aquarial Gardens in Boston, Massachusetts, of1859 (now the New England Aquarium)10.

Moore put one aquarium tank near the turnstile at the entrance and used it todisplay shells, insects, freshwater fish and plants. He placed two smaller tanks inthe next room and they also contained insects and fish together. Thomas Mooreapplied the expertise that he had gained as Deputy Curator of Lord Derby’smenagerie to keeping live creatures, and developed his own ways of obtainingthem. Liverpool was a very busy port, and ships’ crews came to the town by thethousands. Moore had both salt and fresh water tanks in the early days of his newaquarium and sought to establish the museum as a willing recipient of theirexotic imports. In this way his aquarium obtained supplies of aquatic creaturesfrom different parts of the world. In the year Moore opened the aquarium,Samuel Archer, the ship’s surgeon on the SS Great Britain, brought two livingchitons (molluscs) and six living anemones from South Australia and CapeVerde, and presented them to the museum. Within a few months he wasreporting that the installation of aquarium tanks had created an increase in visitsto the Derby Museum to 123,059.

10 Solski, Leszek, 2004-5. Public Aquariums 1853 – 1914: Historical Perspective. Wroclaw, - translatedwith an abstract in Der Zoologische Garden, 75 (5-6), 2006, pp.362-397 – lists early publicaquariums in date order.


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Even before it opened the Derby Museum started to receive donations. Thoughthe founding collection was of natural history, model ships and the products ofhuman cultures from around the world started to trickle in. In 1852, A. Grahamgave four amulets taken from Malay pirates. Two years later the Earl of Derbypresented Malaccan cockspurs and fishhooks, and in 1855 Mr William Guthriepresented material which he collected when working as an engineer on a steameron the River Niger. Two years later the widow of Captain Savage gave herhusband’s collection of nearly 500 ‘weapons of savage races, many unique’11.

Moore had an office off the first floor galleries of the Derby Museum and visitorsoccasionally discovered him among the natural history displays. He wouldengage them in conversation about the birds on show, displaying the ‘zeal of anenthusiastic naturalist’12. His personal inclination was towards natural history andhe showed no sign that he wanted to broaden his interest. The slow trickle ofartefacts into the museum did little to disturb him, but the trickle threatened tobecome a flood in 1856 when Joseph Mayer, the owner and proprietor of theEgyptian Museum, offered his collection to the town council. Mayer hadevidently heard about the plans that the town council was beginning to hatch fora new larger museum. Even as the Derby Museum was opened, Picton and hisfellow campaigners knew that it was too small.

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11 West, A.C., 1981. Notes on the History of the Ethnology Department, typewritten text, EthnologyDepartment, Merseyside County Museum, p.2.

12 Shimmin, H., 1857. Liverpool Life: Its Pleasures, Practices and Pastimes, 2nd series (reprinted fromthe Liverpool Mercury). ‘The Derby Museum’, chapter X, pp.72-7, p.75


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Chapter 2 – 1853-1860 – William Brown

Plans began for a larger museum almost as soon as the Derby Museum opened inits hastily-built home on Slater Street. At a council meeting on 21 September 1853,Liverpool’s Mayor, Samuel Holme, announced that William Brown had comeforward with an offer of £6,000 to build a library and museum if the councilwould provide the site for it.

William Brown was an Irish-American who had made a fortune in nearly fortyyears of business dealings in Liverpool. Born in Ballymena on 30 May 1784, hewas the son of a Belfast linen merchant, Alexander Brown. At the age of twelvehe was sent to boarding school in Catterick, Yorkshire, and, when he was sixteen,his father moved the family to Baltimore, U.S.A. Alexander Brown importedIrish linen, and sent cotton and tobacco back to Europe. He set up the firstinvestment bank in the U.S.A. and, within a few years, became one of its firstmillionaires. He sent his son William, the eldest of four brothers, back toEngland to establish a foothold for the family business. William Brown choseLiverpool because of its shipping links to America, and founded the merchantbank William Brown & Co. there in 1810. His brothers expanded the Brown’sbank in the U.S.A., setting up branches in Philadelphia in 1818, and New York in1825. William Brown’s Liverpool business financed shipping between Europe andthe United States, and he took on a partner, Joseph Shipley, in 1824. Thecompany’s fortunes endured difficult times and great success. It became BrownShipley & Co. in 1838, and by the mid 1840s was reckoned to operate a sixth of thetrade between Great Britain and the United States13. William Brown served termsas a J.P. and was M.P. for South Lancashire between1846 and 1859.

When Brown made his offer to finance a museum and library building, thecouncil rapidly found a site for it in the north of the town on Shaw’s Brow. It wasa steep difficult road fringed by dilapidated houses and dingy shops, with ‘low’public houses on every corner. Here the council chose to develop an ambitiousgroup of civic buildings to reflect the growing power and confidence of the town.Near the top of Shaw’s Brow was Lime Street Station where the railway arrived inLiverpool, and opposite the station, the council was building a concert hall, court

13 McCarthy, Michael, 2010. The house that trust built: William Brown and the rise of BrownShipley in 19th century Liverpool. p.18. This book was commissioned by descendants of WilliamBrown and sponsored by the banks Brown Brothers Harriman and Brown Shipley mark the 200th

anniversary of William Brown’s arrival in Liverpool in 1810 and the 150th anniversary of hisdonation of the library and museum in 1860.)


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house and assembly hall all in one – the magnificent St George’s Hall. It tookover a decade for St George’s Hall to be built and it opened in September 1854.

The council widened Shaw’s Brow, and cut back the rock at the top of the hill toreduce the gradient of the road. To acquire the buildings along Shaw’s Browrequired an Act of Parliament. The Liverpool Improvement Act of 16 July 1855allowed the council to enforce the acquisition of the land and buildings requiredfor the new library and museum. It took so long that on 22 October 1855, WilliamBrown wrote to the council in frustration.

When in 1853, I promised Mr. Holme, the Mayor, £6,000 for building a FreeLibrary, it was on the condition that the Corporation would find a site, andthat I might have the pleasure of seeing it built and in operation duringmy life ... If the Corporation is resolved not to proceed in this affair, I shallconsider that it now wishes to decline my offer, for I never considered anindefinite postponement of this measure14.

The council managed to appease William Brown, at least for the time being.

News of the negotiations over a new museum brought an offer from theLiverpool silversmith and prolific antiquities collector Joseph Mayer. He wrote tothe council in April 1856, and his letter was read out at a council meeting:

I shall be happy to deposit my collection in the public museum whencompleted, if it be found that there is space enough to spare, that wouldcontain them…15

The council referred the matter to Picton’s Library and Museum Committee.

Joseph Mayer was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, in 1803. Hemoved to Liverpool when he was twenty and set up his own jewellery andsilversmith business in his early forties. His interest in collecting began at anearly age and he used his business trips to study and to buy a huge range ofmaterial. His chief interests were in Central America, medieval Europeanmanuscripts, ivories and enamels, and ancient Egypt. His Egyptian Museum in

14 Hume, Rev. Abraham, ed., 1858. Documents and proceedings connected with the donation of afree public library and museum, by William Brown Esq., M.P., to the town of Liverpool, p.5, letterof 22 October 1855 from William Brown, Richmond Hill, Liverpool.

15 Library and Museum Committee Minutes, November 1855-September 1858, pp. 63 and 68.


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Colquitt Street, Liverpool, showed only a part of his collection. It was clear thatthe quality, range and number of artefacts that he collected would make animpressive addition to Liverpool’s planned museum, balancing the naturalhistory collection of Lord Derby.

Mayer attended a meeting of Picton’s Library and Museum Committee on 4 April1856. He said that he would lend his collection to the new museum, with theintention of presenting it eventually to the town. The committee arranged tovisit him on the following Tuesday to view the collection. There is no record ofwhat happened during that visit but there must have been a falling out as thematter was dropped. Without Mayer’s collection, the new museum continued tobe planned as an overwhelmingly natural history museum.

The council launched a competition in February 1856 inviting architects to designthe new museum and library, and offering 150 guineas and 100 guineas for thetwo best designs. 115 ‘sketches’ were sent in, and were exhibited for a week at StGeorge’s Hall in September. The entries were displayed anonymously with eachcompetitor using an alias. Each of them was asked to nominate the three bestdesigns, apart from his own. The final decision on the winners of the cash prizeswas made by the Library and Museum Committee with advice from theCorporation Surveyor, John Weightman. The winner was the design bearing thealias Con Amore, and the 100 guineas second prize went to a design markedAlma. Con Amore turned out to be the watercolourist and architect ThomasAllom. His winning scheme proposed an ornate façade covered with expensivesculpture and was selected in spite of being considered too costly. Liverpool’sborough surveyor John Weightman was charged with adapting the design. Heproduced a similar, if simpler design with a suitably massive six-columnCorinthian portico.

On 5 April 1857, William Brown laid the foundation stone of the new museumand library amid an enormous civic fuss. The day began with the obligatoryVictorian ‘breakfast’ party. William Brown sat at the right hand of the DeputyMayor, Samuel Holmes, and James Allanson Picton introduced a series ofdeputations from the town’s societies and institutions.

As William Brown emerged from the Town Hall the band struck up See theConquering Hero Come, and the assembled dignitaries marched three abreastthrough the main streets of Liverpool led by the Fire Brigade and the band of theBluecoat Hospital, where William Brown was a board member. Thousands of


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spectators lined the route, flags were out on buildings, and the bells of the parishchurch rang out.

At 12 noon they arrived at the site of the museum, and a cavity in the foundationstone was loaded with coins and newspapers of the day, and a medalcommemorating of the Treaty of Paris, which had marked the end of theCrimean War in 1856. The stone was duly laid and there were speeches, and thena banquet in St. George’s Hall, the first to be held in the relatively new building.The band of the Royal Lancashire Artillery entertained the guests.

William Brown was 72 years old and appeared uncomfortable throughout the dayaccording to the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was finishing aterm of office as United States consul in Liverpool, and attended all the festivities.He wrote in his English Notebooks:-

Mr. Browne (sic) himself, the hero of the day, was the plainest and simplestman of all - an exceedingly unpretending gentleman in black; small,white-haired, pale, quiet, and respectable. I rather wondered why he choseto be the centre of all this ceremony; for he did not seem eitherparticularly to enjoy it, or to be at all incommoded by it, as a more nervousand susceptible man might have been16

Using powers given to it by the Liverpool Improvement Act of 1855, the councilwas gradually acquiring and clearing the area on Shaw’s Brow for the newmuseum. From a Mr. Bradshaw they bought for £3,500 ‘a freehold property at thecorner of Shaw’s Brow and Byrom Street containing about 2,188 square yards ofLand with houses, shops and Warehouse thereon’17.

The sloping site necessitated extensive foundations and a huge terrace from thehigher part of the street to the entrance of the new museum and library building.(The terrace survived until the early 1900s when it was replaced by the massiveset of steps that now lead to the building’s classical portico.) The council had tocover escalating costs of the site and demolitions, and, as costs of the buildingitself increased, William Brown guaranteed to pay for the work. By October 1859the old houses around the site had nearly all been cleared away and the roof was

16 Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1857. English Notebooks, 15 April,www.eldritchpress.org/nh/pfenb01.html#d1857, accessed 20.09.09, and quoted in Kouwenhaven,J.A., 1968. Partners in Banking. p.105.

17 1857. Minute of Council meeting 14 October. Council Minute Book December 1856-March 1859, p266.


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on the new library and museum. The building emerged as a new landmark andwas forming a group with Lime Street Station and St George’s Hall. Togetherthey expressed Liverpool’s civic pride and power.

As Thomas Moore worked on plans for displays in the new museum he wasjoined by Reverend Henry Hugh Higgins, Liverpool town councillor and shortlyto be a member of the Library and Museum Committee. Higgins was born inTurvey Abbey, Bedfordshire, and arrived in Liverpool in 1843 as an inspector ofChurch of England schools. He held a number of curacies, was chaplain to theRainhill Asylum, and served twice as president of the Liverpool Literary andPhilosophical Society. He was also a natural history enthusiast and volunteer atthe Derby Museum.

Both Moore and Higgins were natural historians and their proposed displaysfocused on the natural history collections of the Earl of Derby, Moore working onthe vertebrate collections and Higgins on invertebrate collections. As theyplanned the displays, their world was rocked by discussions on ideas of evolutionand natural selection. On 22 November 1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species went onsale to the public. 1,250 copies were printed, most of which sold the first day.Reverend Henry Higgins, as president of the Literary and Philosophical Societyof Liverpool, gave an address to the society On Darwin’s Theory of the Origin ofSpecies. In spite of his muscular religious convictions, Higgins thought Darwin’sideas were ‘confirmed’. His ebullient and optimistic Christian belief saw thedivine in the natural world and in Darwin’s theories.

The laws which Mr Darwin has discovered are found, sure enough, hiddenbelow the glorious movements on the face of nature.18

Liverpool’s Library and Museum Committee circulated a pamphlet, Liverpool Free

Public Library and Derby Museum: reports on fitting up the new building, with threereports with plans for the contents of the new building. One report was writtenby Thomas Moore the curator of the museum. One was written by John StuartDalton, the librarian. The third was written by the Reverend Henry Higgins.

The proposals had art in the new entrance hall and in the gallery running roundthe hall on the first floor. The library had six rooms to the right of the entrancehall, and the museum had six rooms to the left of the entrance hall as well asnearly the whole of the first floor. Ten or eleven of the museum rooms were to

18 Higgins, Rev. Henry H., 1883. ‘The Natural Theology of Music’, Sermons Broad and Short.Simkins, Marshall & Co., London.


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show Lord Derby’s collection of natural history. One room was allocated forethnology, and two for the two models of Liverpool and examples of Liverpoolimports from the old museum on Slater Street.

The pamphlet on the arrangements for the new museum and library wasreleased to a select band of men who were invited to discuss the proposals at ameeting on a Saturday evening in December 1859. One of those who received thepamphlet was the Reverend Abraham Hume, vicar of Vauxhall, honorary canonof Liverpool and long-time supporter of the museum. He rushed out a pamphletof his own complaining of the strong natural-history bias in Moore’s andHiggins’s proposals for the museum. He declared that the discussion of thelayout of the museum was biased. There were, he said, ‘two highly respectedadvocates on behalf of one subject and not a voice raised on behalf of any other’19.

The Library and Museum Committee quieted Reverend Hume’s complaint with aclaim that the new building would cover some 6,000 square yards on each floor,and there would be ‘ample room for the full development of every branch of theestablishment’20. In fact their figure for the footprint of the new building was awild overestimate. It actually covered less than 4,000 square yards.

While Moore and Higgins laboured, the new museum and library was finishedand William Brown formally handed the building over amid a great civicbrouhaha. Brown was naturally at the centre of the celebrations. When he hadfirst approached the town council seven years before, he had offered £6,000towards the costs of building a new library and museum, but when the buildingopened it was reported that he spent £40,000.

The festivities began on the evening of Wednesday 17 October when the Mayorand the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, addressed a meeting at theAmphitheatre, Great Charlotte Street, Liverpool, heralding the opening of thenew Free Public Library and Museum. A ‘working man’, Daniel Guile, addressedthe meeting and gave a warning about the responsibilities the new library andmuseum brought with it.

19 Hume, Rev. Abraham, 1859. Character of Liverpool Town Museum with suggestions for itsinterior arrangement. (Reprinted from Daily Post). p.3

20 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Library and Derby Museum, 1858. Sixth Annual Report,October, p.6.


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But, my working friends, before we can attain the utmost of goodderivable from this institution we have a great deal to learn. Self-denialmust be exercised. The power of the mind must gain complete victoryover sensual appetites. Our leisure hours, instead of being spent in thetaproom, the singing room and the dancing room, must be given to study,to thought, to perseverance and to industry; and with these aids, and theaid of knowledge, which is now placed within our reach, what shall hinderus from becoming the envy of surrounding nations and the pride of theworld?21

Thursday 18 October 1860, the eighth anniversary of the opening of the library inthe old building on Duke Street, was declared a public holiday on which WilliamBrown was to present the new Free Public Library and Museum to the Mayor ofLiverpool. All shops, banks and markets were closed. Flags were out onbuildings and on shipping in the docks. A procession marched round the townfrom the Town Hall to the new library and museum, and the ceremony ofhanding over the building took place on a platform in front of the new building.

A granite plaque commemorating the event was placed above the building’sentrance.

“This building, containing the Free Public Library, Museum and Gallery ofArts, including the Museum of Natural History presented by the Earl ofDerby, was erected, on a site provided by the Corporation, at the sole costof William Brown of Liverpool, Merchant, and by him presented to hisfellow townsmen, October 18, 1860”.

In the evening the Mayor gave a banquet in nearby St. George’s Hall for about850 people. William Brown acknowledged a toast to his health and followed upon Derek Guile’s speech of the previous night, musing on the possible effect ofmuseum and library on the working man.

The time has happily gone when it was considered dangerous to instructthe people. Nothing is more satisfactory than to see how knowledgeenables the labouring classes to understand and appreciate the advantagesthat they and their country derive from improved machinery…22

21 Cowell, Peter, 1903. Liverpool public libraries: a history of fifty years. pp.71-2.

22 1860. London Illustrated News, Saturday 27 October, pp.405-6


21

A full-length marble statue of William Brown by Irish sculptor PatrickMacDowell was installed in a niche of the Great Hall of St George’s Hall, and wasunveiled by the Mayor during the evening. The council also commissioned a fulllength portrait of William Brown from Scottish portrait painter Sir John WatsonGordon, and a medal was struck with Brown’s portrait on one side and a view ofthe new building on the other23.

On the night after the formal opening, Friday 19 October, the Mayor held a grandsoirée in the Town Hall for about 1,200 guests and William Brown was again theguest of honour.

Writing some years later, Picton described Liverpool’s new museum and librarywith pride.

The building is spacious and handsome, and admirably adapted for thepurposes of the institution. Its position and aspect are all that could bedesired. Standing on a commanding eminence facing the south, with alarge open unobstructed area in front, the view of the town from theportico is singularly striking. The contiguous locality is the finest inLiverpool, architecturally speaking. St. George’s Hall, the Free Library, thecommanding façade of the Railway Hotel, the Alexandra Theatre, theWellington Column, the equestrian statues of the Queen and PrinceConsort, form an artistic group which we might t ravel far to seesurpassed. Soon after the opening of the building, the name of the streetwas changed, by a vote of the Council, from Shaw’s Brow to WilliamBrown Street.24

William Brown’s name is commemorated in the surviving name of his bank aswell as in the name of the street in front of the museum and library. A little overa year after he opened the new library and museum Brown was made a baronetin the New Year’s Honours list. He died in Liverpool in 1864, and a year later hismerchant bank opened a London office. His firm carried on as Brown Shipley,but within a couple of decades of his death the Liverpool office closed. The

23 The portrait by Sir John Watson Gordon is in National Museums Liverpool's collections (WAG1138), as are two copies of the medal (26.11.13.12 and LIV.2010.117).

24 James Allanson Picton, 1875. Memorials of Liverpool: historical and topographical, including ahistory of the dock estate, 2nd edition, vol.2, Longmans, Green & Co., London, & G.G. Walmsley,Liverpool. p.301.


22

Brown Shipley bank continues today as one of a group of private banks owned bythe KBC Group NV, one of Europe’s largest financial companies.

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Chapter 3 – 1860-1890 – The new museum

Thomas Moore, the museum’s curator, and John Stuart Dalton, the townlibrarian, set about equipping the new museum and library building for openingto the public. Dalton quickly transferred the library’s stock from the old buildingin Duke Street, and opened for business on 3 December 1860, within a few weeksof William Brown handing over the building.

The museum took longer. Moore vacated the building on Slater Street, which fora few years Liverpool artist William G. Herdman used for occasional exhibitionsof pictures. In the new building Moore complained about the dampness of thewalls and the time taken to acquire and install display cases. He finally got themuseum open to the public on 18 October 1861, exactly a year after WilliamBrown handed over the building.

When it first opened the grand entrance hall was fitted out with casts of classicalstatues, and the upper floor with displays mainly of birds from the Earl of Derby’sbequest. The remainder of the museum was not ready to open and remained shutfor a further ten months, until 14 August 1862.

The backbone of the museum was still the 13th Earl of Derby’s founding collectionfrom Knowsley Hall. His son, the 14th Earl of Derby showed the Prince andPrincess of Wales round the library and museum on their visit to Liverpool on 31October 1865.

The museum’s direction began to shift when Joseph Mayer donated his amazingcollection of art, antiquities and ethnology in 1867.

Mayer had first offered to make over his collection to the city in 1856, but thediscussions came to nothing and were put aside for more than a decade. Early in1867, Joseph Mayer announced that his collection would go to the museum, andthe contents of his houses in Colquitt Street were moved to William Brown Street.

Picton proposed that the council should show its gratitude to Mayer bycommissioning a statue of him for the great hall of St George’s Hall. Mayerchose the London sculptor Giovanni Fontana, and the statue was unveiled inSeptember 1869. The council also agreed to appoint a curator for his collection inthe museum. The first was H. Ecroyd Smith, who held the post for four years,and he was replaced by Charles Tindal Gatty. For years to come the museumwould have two parts – the Mayer Museum of art and antiquities led by Gatty,


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and the Derby Museum of natural history led by the head of the museum,Thomas Moore.

Some of Mayer’s collection went on display without too much disturbance to thesculpture in the entrance hall or to the natural history collections already laidout.

Even though it was free, visitors entered the museum through turnstiles. Theyarrived in a large hall, with, in the middle, a statue of Lady Godiva, mounted onher horse for her ride through the streets of Coventry and naked but for her longhair. Along the sides of the hall were plaster casts of antique sculptures, and afew Victorian sculptures. At the far end of the hall, a staircase led up to a seriesof five rooms with the specimens of Lord Derby’s collection arranged by ThomasMoore to show animals from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ forms. Birds shared four roomswith displays of molluscs and other invertebrates, and reptiles and fish shared afifth room with insects. Next was a picture gallery with a collection of porcelainlent by the then M.P. for South Lancashire and future Prime Minister, WilliamGladstone, and, over the doorway, the large painting The Hunted Slave byRichard Ansdell that today hangs in the International Slavery Museum.

Downstairs Lord Derby’s collection continued with three rooms of mammals.Among them was the skeleton of a hump-backed whale which was stranded inthe Mersey near Speke in the year 1863.

In all, natural history displays occupied eight rooms, while Joseph Mayer’scollection was shown in three rooms. Porcelain and pottery was in a roomupstairs, antiquities were in a room on the ground floor; and ancient Egyptianmaterial was in a room in the basement. The balance of the displays shifted aftera few years when a courtyard to the west of the great hall was made into a galleryfor Mayer’s collections. It was roofed over and given cast iron staircases and agallery, a style of design common to museums of the time and similar to whatmay still be seen today at nearby Warrington Museum.

In the basement, at the furthest end, was a door leading to the Aquarium, themost popular display in the museum. It measured 15 metres by 8 metres andhoused over forty tanks of different sizes with reptiles, amphibians, fish andaquatic invertebrates.

The final feature of the museum in its early days was a Gallery of Science andInventions, William Brown’s particular contribution to the displays. In 1861


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William Brown formed a committee of delegates from five learned and tradesocieties to run a Liverpool Gallery of Inventions and Science on the first floor ofthe new museum. Brown expected ‘that Inventors and Manufacturers will beglad to avail themselves of the opportunity of making known the products oftheir ingenuity and labour’25. The gallery was ready in 1862 but no exhibitors hadcome forward. Two members of Brown’s committee were detailed to find exhibitsand arranged that, when the International Exhibition closed in London inNovember 1862, some of the exhibits could be freighted to Liverpool on therailway. The only cost would be ‘cartage from the railway station and fixing inthe building’. Requests for money from the Library and Museum Committee andthe council itself were turned down, so Brown offered £100 and other members ofthe committee came up with smaller amounts. The Gallery of Inventions andScience opened and remained open for a decade or so, but Thomas Moore did notrate it a success.

The council’s annual bill for running the new museum was £3,209 16s 6d, againsta total of £1,205 7s 10d for the old museum on Duke Street – an increase of 166%.However the number of visits rose by 226%, from 98,597 to 321,714 when themuseum moved to its new premises, and continued to rise in the following years.The museum was open to the public for four days each week. Tuesdays andFridays were reserved for cleaning and for visits by students and artists, and themuseum was shut on Sundays.

During the summer of 1864 the daily total of visits exceeded 5,000 on sevenoccasions; and on three days the number of visitors were 7,495, 8,277 and 8,903,causing some severe congestion.

From 1866 a series of Monday evening lectures at the museum ran every yearbetween January and March. Thomas Moore followed the themes of his displayswith twelve lectures on Zoology with special reference to the Specimens in theMuseum, beginning with the Lowest Forms of Animal Life and ending withMammals. The library next door also ran winter lecture programmes andattracted larger crowds. The Library’s 41 lectures between January and March1879 attracted 14,906 people. The series opened with Books by James AllansonPicton, which was followed by What is Science good for? by the Reverend HenryHiggins.

25 1861. Liverpool Gallery of Inventions and Science –first annual report of the committee and theproceedings of the aggregate meeting of the five societies held on 30th October, 1861, Liverpool.


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Evening opening of the museum in the winter of 1864 had a disastrous effect onyoung fish in the aquarium. On one Monday evening a hundred young salmonof only a few days old, died in the aquarium. Sixty died on the following Mondayevening. Gas lighting was blamed and none died on the next Monday when theaquarium was not lit up. Evening opening was discontinued with the arrival ofspring.

After the move to William Brown Street the trickle of donations to the museumincreased to a stream and then a flood. Thomas Moore’s instructions formerchant sailors and travellers on collecting items for the museum werepublished in the Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society ofLiverpool for 1862, and the captains who donated the most and the best specimensto the museum were made associates of the society. Thousands of natural historyspecimens, both dead and alive, poured into the museum. An American captaincame up with a method of transporting smaller fish and other aquatic creaturesin glass globes suspended from the roofs of cabins. This sample of acquisitionscomes from 1864 -

An Extensive Collection of Fish, and Specimens of Crustacea,Cephalopods, Starfish, Shells, Insects &c. from Singapore; presented byRobert Baker, Esq.

A very Extensive and Interesting Collection of Marine Specimens collectedon the voyage to and from Shanghai; presented by Captain, F.E. Baker,Ship Niphon.

…A Coat made of Salmon Skin from the Amoor River; a Coral; a Snakefrom West Indies; Three Bottles of Snakes, Fish, Insects, Porpite, a Lizard&c., from Mazatt; Two Turtles (Caouana caretta), and the stern of theBarque Edwin and Lizzie broken by a Whale; presented by J.O.W. Fabert,Esq.

A fine Specimen of Brown Quartz, from Cornwall, presented by Mr.Fairbairn…26

The captains of trading ships set up exchanges with museums and othercollectors around the world speeding up the acquisition rate for natural historyspecimens. Captain Perry, of the ss Humbolt worked on contacts with museums

26 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum and Gallery of Arts, 1864. TwelfthAnnual Report, November, pp.7-12.


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in Lisbon and Buenos Ayres, the Natural History Society of Montreal, and adoctor in Rio de Janeiro. Captain Howison, of the ss Navarre arranged for threeliving young sturgeons to be sent from the aquarium at the Zoological Gardens,Hamburg, in exchange for living specimens of Norway lobster.

As specimens came in from round the world, museum staff also carried out localresearch and collecting. Thomas Moore was an active member of the LiverpoolBiological Society, and Frederick Price Marrat a part-time assistant at themuseum, collected and worked on shells, minerals and fossils, as he had donepreviously for the 13th Earl of Derby at Knowsley.

The enthusiastic councillor and museum volunteer, Reverend Henry Higginsspotted that fossils were being revealed by work on new railway cuttings atRavenhead on the line between Liverpool and St. Helens. The site was about 11/2

miles from his house. He visited over a hundred times in less than a year, andpaid the workmen a few pennies or small amounts of tobacco to save fossils forhim. He amassed a considerable collection of fossils of flora, fish and bivalveswith some insects. It was donated to the museum and was published by Higginsand Frederick Price Marrat.

While Moore and Higgins continued their focus on the natural world, JamesAllanson Picton began to agitate for an art gallery. As soon as the new museumand library building was finished in 1860, his committee had changed its name tothe Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum and Gallery of Arts, inanticipation of wished-for developments. The council did not adopt the wholecumbersome name but did allow the title Library, Museum and Arts Committee.

Picton bided his time and then, in 1865, announced that a site for a new art galleryhad been identified, just up the road from the library. In fact, he claimed, the sitehad been intended for an art gallery for some time. Within a year the councilwas preparing to clear the site and the Borough Architect had started work onplans for the gallery.

On 4 September 1871 the first of a series the Annual Exhibitions of Paintingsopened at the museum. Moore and museum staff cleared rooms of museumexhibits, and 887 pictures by contemporary artists went on show. 235 were sold fora total of £6,395 2s 6d, and commission on these sales, Picton claimed, more thancovered the costs of the exhibition. Picton pronounced the enterprise a greatsuccess, and announced that they would do the same next year.


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His committee spent £500 on pictures from the exhibition for what he now called‘the Permanent Gallery’. They bought the large Elaine, or The Lily Maid ofAstolat, painted 1870 by Sophie Anderson, from the 1871 Autumn Exhibition, andit was not long before The Death of Nelson by president of the Royal Academy,Benjamin West, was presented to their new collection by Bristow H. Hughes.

In all, six annual autumn exhibitions of pictures were held in the museum – from1871 to 1876. As Picton had doubtless hoped, they demonstrated that the museumwas not suitable or large enough for the increasingly popular exhibitions.Clearly a permanent and more spacious home for the exhibitions had to befound.

On 10 November 1873 the first act of a new Mayor of Liverpool, Andrew BarclayWalker, was to announce that he would finance the building of a new gallerywith a gift of £20,000. The council accepted his offer with alacrity and resolvedthat the building should be called The Walker Art Gallery. Walker, who had abrewery in Warrington and was a Liverpool alderman, was not noted as a patronor collector of art, though he was noted for the architectural standard of his pubsand for giving to good causes. His brewery is long gone but its name survives onmany pubs in Liverpool and the surrounding area as Walker’s Warrington Ales.

The site that was agreed for his art gallery was just up William Brown Street fromthe library and museum, opposite St George’s Hall. Just as Brown had done withthe museum, Walker took charge of the building of his art gallery and offinancing the works. The Walker Art Gallery opened on 6 September 1877, withthe seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings in the upper floor galleries.

The galley received 324,117 visitors in its first four months, and for the next fewyears achieved higher numbers of visits than the museum.

As the Walker Art Gallery was being built, the new Picton Library was beingconstructed next door as an extension to William Brown’s library of 1860. Itopened on 8 October 1879 and as it is a large circular building, was inevitablynicknamed Picton's Gasometer in spite of its classical appearance. It filled thegap between the library and the art gallery and continued Liverpool’s greatassemblage of Victorian civic buildings. It was also the first public building inLiverpool to be lit by electric lights.

Both Andrew Barclay Walker and James Allanson Picton were knighted byQueen Victoria in recognition of their civic endeavours.


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An exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in 1880 showed Pre-Historic Antiquitiesof the Mayer Museum and the Ethnographical Collections mainly from theJoseph Mayer collection in the museum. The exhibition was so successful thatthe Library, Museum and Arts Committee decided to build an annex to theWalker to show Mayer’s ethnology on a permanent basis. The annex was built by1881 and an ethnology display was installed. But, no sooner was it built, than thecommittee decided to pull it down again in order to build another extension.

This second extension to the Walker Art Gallery was meant to house the annualautumn exhibition without having to take down paintings already on show, andprovide some space for displays from the ethnography collections. Once againWalker provided the finance - £11,720, the entire cost of the new annexe. TheWalker Art Galley extension opened on 30 August 1884 with the annual autumnexhibition of pictures. The idea that it might be used to show a part of themuseum’s ethnography collections never materialised.

Meanwhile the growth of museum’s collections was unabated. Early in 1876 theReverend Henry Higgins went on a collecting trip, with the museum assistantsJohn Chard and James Woods. They were invited by Reginald Cholmondeley, ofCondover Hall, near Shrewsbury, to join him on the Argo, a large steam yacht hehad chartered for deep sea dredging and collecting in the West Indies. The yachtwas away for about four months, and visited the Canary Islands and several WestIndian Islands, returning via Philadelphia. Higgins wrote enthusiastically abouttheir adventures in articles and a book. He claimed to have avoided seasicknessentirely and took great delight in their dredging operations and the specimens,especially invertebrates that the dredging net brought up. The expeditionreturned with quantities of fish, insects, crustacea, shells, corals, sponges andmosses for the museum.

In the spring of 1884, Higgins launched what is believed to be the first schoolsloan service in the country. Duplicate natural history specimens were arrangedin sixteen boxes, each a cube of about 60cms and were sent to Liverpoolelementary schools for a month at a time. In the first year 64 schools borrowedboxes from the museum. The School Loan Service carried on for decades. In1935 the museum director reported that three thousand specimens were issued to197 schools. The ended when the museum closed after it was bombed in 1941.

When Joseph Mayer died in January 1886, his will caused a minor storm byoffering to hand over the parts of his collections that had not already been givento the city, for £6,000, at to be paid at £300 a year for 20 years. Sir James Picton,


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chair of the Library, Museum and Arts Committee, was furious when the councilnot only refused to finance this offer for the museum’s collection, but alsosuggested cuts in the branch libraries and the lectures at the central library.Picton was eighty years old and could not help seeing the council’s attitude as athreat to his achievements at the library, museum and art gallery. He citedBirmingham, Manchester, Leeds and nearby Preston for their more ambitiousand enlightened support of their museums27. The council remained unmoved,and Mayer’s executors sold the collection at Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge,London.

The possibility of Sunday opening for the museum caused controversy when itwas raised in the City Council in February 1888. The museum was then open forfour days a week. It was closed on Sundays, and was still closed on Tuesdays andFridays for cleaning, rearranging and access for students. The Liverpool Reviewclaimed that some councillors did not want Sunday opening to be discussed andbegan a vitriolic campaign. It claimed that one councillor played billiards onSunday, another owned pubs that opened on Sunday, another had visited abrothel, and yet another had been drunk in the Town Hall28. It painted atouching picture of a family yearning for Sunday opening at the museum.

(Little Janie) : Oh, I would so like to go into the art gallery and museum,mamma, teacher says I’d see such a lot of things that we learn about inschool.

...(Children in chorus) : Are they all very good religious men in the councilwho won’t let the buildings be opened papa?

(Papa, drily) : Oh, very.29

The matter returned to the council early in March. Picton appeared ambivalenton the subject and managed to scupper its chances in council by leaving themeeting early.

27 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum and Walker Art Gallery, 1888. Thirty-Fifth Annual Report, p.3.

28 1888. ‘The Spotless Man of Sorrow and the Liverpool Pharisee’. Liverpool Review, 4 February,p.3.

29 1888. ‘Three Scenes on Sunday’. Liverpool Review, 25 February, p.3.


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Sir James Picton, however, damped the hopes of the advocates of thequestion for the moment by asking for an adjournment just as the matterseemed within grasp. But the council declined this suggestion 41 to 3. SirJames said he had to go to London by the next train and, therefore, couldnot remain during the discussion, and by and by this wonderful man of 82trotted off to his train enveloped in a huge overcoat with an enormous sealcollar.30

After Picton had left the council meeting, Sunday opening was voted out by 26 to17.

From October 1888 the museum resumed Monday evenings opening from 7pm to10pm, and restarted a winter season of lectures. The experiment had been triedin the 1870s but had been abandoned because of the ‘disorderly conduct’ of someof the visitors. The new season comprised fourteen lectures on Monday eveningsbetween 1 October and 31 December. The first was given by Reverend HenryHiggins and second by Thomas Moore, the curator of the museum.

In 1890 the museum started opening on Tuesdays, which meant it was open fivedays a week instead of four. On Fridays the museum remained closed for behind-the-scenes work and for students to use the collections. It continued to be shut onSundays.

The museum settled down to an annual total of about 300,000 visits, and even theextra opening failed to disturb this equilibrium.

As the nineteenth century ended, three most influential figures of the museum’searly years died. Picton, Moore and Higgins were the pivotal figures in takingLiverpool’s museum from its beginnings to a position of scale and strength, andthe three of them died within four years. Sir James Allanson Picton died on 15July 1889, Thomas John Moore died on 31 October 1892, and Reverend HenryHugh Higgins died on 2 July 1893.

Picton had been chairman of the council’s Library and Museum Committee fornearly forty years. The conscientious Thomas Moore arrived at the museum withLord Derby’s collection in 1852, and worked for forty years until his death at homein Victoria Road, Tuebrook in North Liverpool. Reverend Henry Higgins wasassociated with the museums for almost the same period - 37 years - and for

30 1888. ‘In The City Council: Defeat of the Sunday Question’. Liverpool Review, 10 March, p.12.


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sixteen years he was chairman of the Museums Sub-committee of Picton’sLibrary, Museum and Arts Committee.

One of Higgins’s last achievements pioneered national museum affairs when hebecame the first president of the Museum Association.

The Museums Association continues today and is the professional organisationfor museum staff. Higgins presided at its first conference which was held inLiverpool. The conference opened with a conversazione at the museum onTuesday 17 June 1890. Doors opened at quarter to eight and evening dress wasworn.

The proceedings lasted four days and were attended by delegates from sixteenmuseums. Museum assistants John Chard and Richard Paden gave papers at theconference. Thomas Moore gave two papers - Notes on the Liverpool Free PublicMuseum and A Plea for Local Geological Models - and Higgins gave apresidential address.

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Chapter 4 – 1890-1898 – Electric catfish

Alderman Sir William Bower Forwood at fifty years old was a splendid exampleof Liverpool’s Victorian merchant elite. An experienced, even formidable,politician, merchant and ship-owner, he was Mayor of Liverpool in 1880 and hewas knighted in 1883. Sir William was elected a member of the board of directorsof the Cunard Company in 1888. He and his older brother Sir Arthur BowerForwood ran the West India & Pacific Steamship Company, and had extensivefamily interests in trading and shipping.

When Sir James Picton died, Sir William replaced him as chairman of the Library,Museum and Arts Committee, after a short interlude with Alderman EdwardSamuelson in the chair. He picked up on Picton’s theme that Liverpool’sgreatness should be reflected in cultural institutions of exceptional quality. LikePicton, he complained that paying for them from the rates at one penny in thepound was only half of what other towns spent.

It is most difficult to bring home to the minds of men that the educationand culture of people is as essential to their happiness and the welfare ofthe community as drainage and a good water supply is to their health…31

Sir William’s chief ambition as the new champion of culture in the city was toincrease the number of branch libraries. His chief delight was to lead the springtrips to the London studios of artists such as Lord Leighton and the ageing Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais to discuss the Annual Exhibitions of Pictures atthe Walker Art Gallery.

After the curator Thomas Moore’s death in 1892 there was a sixteen month gapbefore the arrival of a new director for the museum. Richard Paden wasappointed assistant curator of the museum and filled the vacuum. He hadworked at the museum since 1864, and when Moore died he was updating themuseum’s pioneering schools loan service. He held a consultative meeting withhead teachers and with science teachers. Then he put together new cabinets witha selection of mechanical and physical apparatus to illustrate useful technicalprinciples, and published a catalogue of the collection for Liverpool’s elementaryschools. While Paden was in charge of the museum, an exceptional collection ofagates arrived from the bequest of the 15th Earl of Derby, grandson of the Earlwho had started the museum with his bequest of natural history specimens.

31 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum and Walker Art Gallery, 1894. Forty-First Annual Report. Introduction by Alderman Sir William B. Forwood, p.4.


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The new director of the museum, Henry Ogg Forbes, took up the post on 20February 1894. Shortly after he arrived Richard Paden was taken ill, and he diedin November, at the age of 44, and having worked about 30 years in the museum.

Forbes was forty-three years old when he arrived in Liverpool and already had aremarkable career behind him.

He studied medicine at Aberdeen University and at Edinburgh under the greatsurgeon Joseph Lister. The loss of an eye ended his medical studies and heswitched careers to become an ornithologist with an interest in ethnology andcartography. He went to Portugal as a scientific collector in the 1870s, and to theEast Indies from 1878 to 1884. When he returned to England he produced ANaturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago: a Narrative of Travel andExploration from 1873 to 1883. Then he set off on an expedition to New Guinea.On the way he lost his equipment and, after several attempts to rescue themission and stints as a government agent and a meteorological observer, hereturned to England disappointed in 1888. In 1890 he was appointed director ofthe Canterbury Museum in New Zealand.

Henry Forbes arrived in Liverpool with an ambition that the museum should bethe most popular in Britain. He compared 1893 visit numbers for museum -299,319 - with those of the British Museum of Natural History - 408,208 - and theBritish Museum - 538,560. Considering the difference in size between London andLiverpool, Forbes thought that these figures were very satisfactory, but heannounced that the Liverpool museum would attract many more visitors if thecollections were better organised. His first moves were to arrange for previouslyunseen ethnology collections to go on display in the museum’s basement, and toimprove the aquarium.

Liverpool’s Lord Mayor opened the new ethnographic gallery on 19 June 1895.The basement rooms had been gutted, their walls boarded with varnished pine,and cases of polished hardwood fitted in. The Assistant Curator, Peter Entwistle,had worked on the Joseph Mayer’s gift for nearly twenty years, and this was hisfirst ‘permanent’ display of Mayer’s ethnographical treasures.

In the aquarium new plate-glass fronts improved visibility, and an extra supply ofwater from the mains fed the freshwater tanks and gave more power to theaerating pumps for the salt-water tanks. To improve the aeration in freshwatertanks water was brought in at the bottom rather that at the top. The list ofcreatures in the aquarium showed an impressive variety of species including a


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‘New Orleans alligator’, a ‘West African crocodile’, and a giant North Americansalamander called a ‘Hell Bender’ that was said to have lived in its tank forfourteen years.

A number of the more exotic species were gifts from Arnold Ridyard, chiefengineer of the Elder Dempster Line. Elder Dempster was one of the UK’s largestshipping companies and the major shipping line to serve West Africa. It wasbased in Liverpool and during its 150-year history operated more than 500 ships.Ridyard had an agreement from the owners that he could transport material formuseums and especially for Liverpool’s museum. For about twenty years, hebrought in an amazing stream of natural history, ethnography and livespecimens.

Ridyard caused great excitement with some live electric catfish in April 1895. Hebrought them from the Gambon River in West Africa, feeding them worms,small fishes, and pieces of boiled liver during the long sea journey. When theyarrived in the museum’s aquarium, Professor Gotch, Professor of Physiology inUniversity College, Liverpool, set out to investigate how they made theirelectrical discharge.

Gotch and Forbes took an electric catfish to London to show at a conversazione ofthe Royal Society on 1 May 1895. Several hundred of the guests, including QueenVictoria’s son, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and her cousin-in-law, the 1st Duke ofTeck, put their hands into the fish’s tank and received an electric shock. Theevent lasted for four hours reportedly without tiring the fish. The evening wassuch a success that Forbes later took the fish to Ipswich and showed it at twomore conversaziones of the British Association.

In 1898 Ridyard gave the museum six more electric catfish one of which was60cms in length and weighed 4kg. He also donated three other catfish, fourAfrican lung-fish, twenty mudskippers and three unidentified fish. As well asmaking personal donations, Ridyard acted on behalf of other donors. He broughtfrom Mr. Forman twenty-one mudskippers, seven of which were transferred tothe Zoological Gardens, London, and from W.G. Stokes three young fish fromWest Africa. The museum had to increase the number of warm water tanks inthe aquarium to accommodate Ridyard’s annual gifts of fish. By 1900 theaquarium was showing a monster list of creatures including anemones, beetles,shrimps, crabs, snails, eels, fish, frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, a tortoise,snakes, chameleons, lizards, a crocodile and birds. The museum passed on


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creatures that it could not handle to the Zoological Gardens, London, includingin 1900 cats, a rat, monkeys and a mongoose.

As well as live animals Ridyard brought remarkable ethnographic collectionsfrom West Africa. He donated the largest quantity of material to Liverpool’smuseum, but he also contributed to other museums in the north-west includingSalford and Bolton, with everything coming from Africa without freight chargescourtesy of Elder Dempster.

A meeting of the British Association took place in Liverpool in September 1896.The president of the British Association was Joseph Lister, the English surgeonwho promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow RoyalInfirmary, and the former teacher of museum director Henry Forbes. A museumassistant, William Shepherd Laverock, was appointed specifically to prepare forthe British Association’s visit and the museum closed for three weeks toaccommodate its meeting. A Handbook to Liverpool and the neighbourhood waspublished for the Association’s visit with an essay by Forbes on vertebrate fauna,and an essay on trade and commerce by Alderman Sir William Forwood,chairman of the Library, Museum and Arts Committee.

Laverock and the other museum assistants were allowed to attend relevantmeetings during the Association’s visit. The geological section met in themuseum’s small lecture theatre. In the bird gallery Professor Oliver Lodge gavea demonstration of X-rays. In the entrance hall among the ancient Egyptdisplays, Mr. Whittle showed Foucault’s experiment demonstrating the rotation ofthe earth by a huge pendulum suspended from the top of the hall. In theAquarium ichthyologists were particularly impressed with the electric catfishesand a group of mudskippers.

In August 1897 Forbes published the first Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums. SirWilliam Forwood welcomed it as a new departure for publishing originalresearch, descriptions of new acquisitions, and catalogues of parts of thecollection. Forbes’s catalogue of parrots was in the first issue.

In the second edition, Forbes related the acquisition of some exceptional Beninivories and bronzes for the museum, part of a flood of Benin artefacts taken fromthe palace of the Oba (King) of Benin in a punitive raid in 1897. Forbes’s view ofevents in 1897 is a snapshot of imperial actions by the British.


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The barbarous massacre, “by the orders of the King of Benin and hisCouncillors”, of members of an official mission pacifically proceedingfrom the Niger Coast Protectorate Government to visit the King will befresh in everyone’s recollection. The punitive expedition sent by HerMajesty’s Government, under Admiral Rawson, to bring to account theperpetrators of this terrible outrage, captured the city on 18th of Februarylast, and among the spoils interesting to ethnologists were, besides manylarge elaborately-carved elephants’ tusks and other smaller objects inivory, a great number of flat plaques, and statuettes in the round, of cast-metal looking like bronze...

The museum has been fortunate in securing some important examples, ofwhich we propose to give an account in the following pages...32

Forbes lists and describes a magnificent set of acquisitions of Benin materialmade in the year of the raid, but gives no further information about how they gotto the museum. There were a number of auctions in London and Paris of objectslooted from the Benin palaces but the museum’s records do not show purchasesfrom them. Instead the museum bought from various individuals, possiblydealers, and a smaller number Benin items were acquired as gifts by ArnoldRidyard, or by others through him.

Henry Forbes went on an expedition, to the islands of Socotra off the east ofAfrica. The expedition left late in 1898 and returned in March 1899, and wasorganised jointly with the British Museum. Forbes and the museum taxidermist,the aptly-named James William Cutmore, went with W.R. Ogilvie-Grant from theBritish Museum. On the way the expedition landed at Abd al-Kuri, a previouslyunexplored island between Socotra and Cape Guardafui, the eastern horn ofAfrica. They spent nearly three months on Socotra, and on the return journeypaid a second visit was paid to Abd al-Kuri for a couple of days. The trip yieldedabout 2,000 specimens, of which 100 were new to science, and Forbes pulledtogether a total of twenty two experts, including himself, to identify and describethe birds, plants, reptiles, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, butterflies,

shells, and moths and lichens that the trip produced33.

________________

32 Forbes, Henry O., ed., 1898. Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums, vol.1, no.2, February, pp.49-70,Forbes, Henry O., ‘On a collection of cast-metal work, of high artistic value, from Benin, latelyacquired for the Mayer Museum’, p.49.33 Forbes, Henry O., ed., 1903. The Natural History of Sokotra and Abd-el-Kuri. A note at thebeginning of the book said ‘This volume is issued as a Special Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums’.


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Chapter 5 – 1896-1918 - Horseshoe Galleries

Liverpool had been raised to city status in 1880. Four years later the City Councilbought land next to the museum in 1884 in order to build an extension to themuseum and a school for ‘technical education in the arts and manufactures’34.The project took some time to get going and years later, in 1896, the councillaunched a competition for a design for the new building. The city’s Director ofTechnical Instruction and the museum director Henry Forbes drew up aspecification for the building and the council selected architects to submitdesigns. The winning design was by Edward William Mountford. Immediatelyafter his selection, the council appointed the builders Messrs. Henshaw. On 1 July1898 Alderman Sir William Bower Forwood, chair of the Library, Museum andArts Committee, laid the foundation stone of the museum extension andLiverpool Central Technical School.

The two floors of the museum extension were at the level of the ground floor andupper floor of the existing museum, yet, because the street sloped down, theyalso sat on top of three new floors for the Technical School. The new museumfloors comprised two giant horseshoe-shaped galleries, each of 1,500 squaremetres and called the Upper Horseshoe and Lower Horseshoe35.

Henry Forbes started drawing up plans for exhibitions in the extension soon afterhe arrived in Liverpool in 1894, and he continued to develop them as the buildingwent up. He said that the collections were simply crammed in the old museum’sdisplay cases. The mammal gallery was worst with animals stacked up, andmany other creatures were placed wherever they could be fitted rather than in alogical order. He said that the museum should be “a book with its pages openand its narrative so clearly set out, that they are unawares following a connectedstory, unfolded from room to room before their eyes, which may excite theirinterest and further attention”36. Forbes was not short of advice on his plans.Liverpool Biological Society and the Liverpool Geological Society both discussed

34 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum and Walker Art Gallery, 1886. Thirty-Third Annual Report, p.3

35 Modern visitors to World Museum will find Bug House in the Lower Horseshoe and WorldCultures in the Upper Horseshoe.

36 Ford, W.K., 1955. ‘Notes of the Earlier History of the City of Liverpool Public Museums’.Liverpool Libraries, Museums & Arts Committee Bulletin, November, vol. 5, nos.1 and 2, p.11.


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the matter in 1901 and sent reports on their views to the council’s Museums Sub-committee.

The building work next door proved awkward for the running of the museum. In1900, it was shut for eight months while electric lighting and new heating andventilation systems were installed. As a result the museum was only open for 90days in the year and the number of visits was the lowest ever at 95,041. Thenumber had been 310,482 in the previous year. Sir William claimed that all thedisturbance would all be worthwhile because of the ‘magnificent accommodationthat will be afforded by the new galleries when completed’37. The biggestgalleries, the two new Horseshoe galleries, would, he claimed, be bigger thananything at the British Museum.

In the meantime, though it was overstuffed with exhibits and suffering from thebuilding work around it, the old museum had to manage.

At the same time as suffering building works next door, the area around themuseum was being developed. Opposite the museum, and at the back of StGeorge’s Hall, the disused St. John’s church was demolished in 1899 and replacedwith a small park populated with statues of distinguished Liverpudlians. It wasplanned by the council surveyor, Thomas Shelmerdine, and was finished in 1904.

There were major road works outside the museum. William Brown Street waswidened in order to improve access to the bottom of the street and the newTechnical School and tramlines were laid up the new street. The terrace leadingto the front of the museum was demolished and replaced by the present flight ofabout 39 steps up to the grand portico and the museum entrance.

The Duke of Devonshire opened the Technical School on 26 October 1901, but thetop two floors of the building, the museum extension, were not finished.

The museum extension was finally handed over in July 1902. In total thebuilding had cost £80,00038.

Forbes began the task of fitting it out with displays – a task which took more thanfour years. In 1903 Haigh & Co. of Liverpool delivered 74 new metal cases for the

37 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Museums, 1900. Forty-Seventh Annual Report, 1900(Reprint of the General Report and of the Museums’ portion only of the Report of the Committeeof the Free Public Library, Museums and Walker Art Gallery). p.1.38 Forwood, Sir William B., 1910. Recollections of a busy life. p.116


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new galleries, and Forbes and his staff started rearranging the museum. Thismeant redoing displays in the old museum and well as setting up displays in thenew Horseshoe galleries. The museum extension would finally open in October1906.

Part of the reorganisation of the old museum was an extension to the aquarium.Eleven new aquarium tanks displaced North American ethnography displays inthe museum basement. Forbes and an engineering lecturer in the TechnicalSchool called Honiball came up a system of aeration for the salt-water aquariumtanks using rattan-canes to the bottom of the water, instead of metal pipes. Thesystem produced extremely small bubbles that were reckoned to be better atoxygenating the water and maintaining the health of the occupants.

The specimens for the extended aquarium were found with the help of thecouncil’s Sanitary Sub-Committee and the City Engineer’s Department whooperated the barge Beta on the Mersey. Captain Griffiths of the Beta broughtliving specimens back from his dredging operations, and he occasionally tookmuseum staff on his trips. He also brought back fresh seawater for the aquariumfrom beyond the North-West Lightship at the mouth of the Mersey. In thesummer of 1905 a common seal was brought into the aquarium, possibly byCaptain Griffiths. It was kept in one of the new aquarium tanks where it lived forabout ten years. According to Forbes’s reports, it was in good health and itquickly became one of the museum’s main attractions.

Henry Forbes worked hard to keep interest in the museum while, behind thescenes, work went on new displays. He gave a lecture in the museum on TheMummy, the last of the winter’s series of lectures and its climax. He illustratedthe lecture with items from the museum’s collection, lantern slides and theunwrapping of a mummy of a woman from about 600BC. Forbes reported thatthe audience witnessed that ‘…the face was found in a remarkable state ofpreservation, the hands crossed upon the breast, but the flesh had apparentlybeen removed from the limbs before enswathement of the body’39.

On 26 April 1905, staff discovered a case in the antiquities display had beenopened and a snuff box, signet ring, and seal belonging to Napoleon had beenstolen. The police were at once informed, and the Library, Museum and ArtsCommittee offered a reward of £200. Handbills with full descriptions and

39 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Museums, 1904. Fifty-first Annual Report (Reprint ofthe General Report of the Museums’ portion only of the Report of the Committee of the FreePublic Library, Museums and Walker Art Gallery). p.6.


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drawings of the articles were circulated, and the seal was spotted in apawnbroker’s shop in Liverpool. The woman who took it there was found and herson admitted taking the seal out of the case. The other items were not recovered.

Henry Forbes finally published his scheme for the new museum displays in 1905.His vision was the first to incorporate collections natural history and humancultures into a museum of the world. He also identified space for a separatedisplay on Liverpool. His ‘local’ room for local history and archaeology was thefirst time that Liverpool’s history was acknowledged as a separate subject in themuseum.

The Upper and Lower Horseshoe galleries were designated for natural historydisplays. Natural history was arranged systematically with zoological, geological,mineralogical and botanical sections. In seventeen months the museum’staxidermists, led by J.W. Cutmore, prepared 430 mounted mammals and birds, aswell as cleaning and mending 1,945 other mounted specimens and setting up 246animal skeletons for display.

Their biggest task was to mount a male Indian elephant, presented by Barnum &Bailey Circus. Styled the Greatest Show on Earth, the circus was led by JamesAnthony Bailey, Barnum having died some seven years earlier. It set up inNewsham Park in Liverpool for three weeks in May 1898. Henry Forbes visitedthe circus menagerie and met James Bailey. He praised the standards of animalwelfare in the menagerie, and, as a result, when a giant kangaroo died during thecircus’s stay in Liverpool, it was given to the museum. Then Bailey decided thathis second largest elephant, Don Pedro, should be ‘euthanised’ because he wasbecoming aggressive. He was offered £50 for the carcass but Bailey decided togive it to the museum. Forbes attended the execution on 15 May 1898, along witha representative of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.Don Pedro was to be strangled, and so ropes were wound three times round itsneck. A large pulley was attached with ninety burly circus-workers on the end ofthe rope. At 8.30 in the morning the command was given to ‘take up the slack’,and then ‘now then, men, walk away with it’. Forbes said of the execution ‘it wasperfect, and so quickly accomplished that the beast did not suffer at all.40’ Theelephant’s body was loaded onto a heavy wooden cart which was pulled to themuseum by a large traction engine.

40 Liverpool Echo, 16 May 1898, quoted in Fisher, Clemency T., 1986. ‘The Greatest Show on Earth:Barnum and Bailey’s circus animals in the collections of Merseyside County Museums’. MuseumsJournal, vol.85, no.4, March. pp.196-197.


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The relationship between Forbes and Bailey continued to bear fruit after thecircus had left town. Bailey sent the museum gifts of an antelope, a puma, apolar bear and a chimpanzee. When the museum taxidermists led by JamesCutmore had finished their work, Don Pedro went on show as the centrepiece ofthe mammal display in the new Upper Horseshoe gallery when it opened in 1906,and stayed there until the museum was burned during the blitz of 1941.

In Forbes’s scheme, the 1860 building was set aside for human cultures and wasdesignated the Mayer Museum. As a natural historian, Forbes was keen toclassify displays of human artefacts into sections. He came up with a pseudo-scientific arrangement in three sections for human artefacts according to theraces whose handiwork they are - Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow) and theMelanian (black). His Mongolian Gallery included China, Japan, Malaya andAmerica, and occupied the top floor of the Mayer Museum. Objects of Caucasianorigin were in the main entrance hall and its surrounding balcony. He classifiedAncient Egypt as Caucasian and Forbes made it the central feature as visitorsentered the museum. The Melanian exhibits from Africa, Melanesia andAustralia were in the museum’s basement.

However his classification system strikes us, Forbes was the first to be explicitabout the museum’s grand ambition to display a microcosm of human culturesand natural history from around the world, or at least from the parts of the worldassociated with the British Empire. The collections of Liverpool’s museum werelarger than most because of the city’s international maritime connections thoughits port and the strength of its foundations in the Derby and Mayer collections.The quality of its collections supported the encyclopaedic ambition of Forbes’sscheme for the museum.

The 16th Earl of Derby opened the new galleries on the evening of 19 October1906. Alderman Sir William Bower Forwood and Lady Forwood welcomed 1,700guests. They were led in procession to the new Lower Horseshoe gallery, wherethere were speeches. An address presented to Lord Derby in a silver casketclaimed that ‘the Museums now opened contain the largest and most completeNatural History and Ethnographical collections in the Provinces’41.

41 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Museums, 1907. Fifty-Fourth Annual Report, 1907(Reprint of the General Report and of the Museums’ portion only of the Report of the Committeeof the Free Public Library, Museums and Walker Art Gallery). p.10 - extract from an ‘address,contained in a silver casket, was presented to Lord Derby’.


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A door from the Museum entrance hall to the library was opened up and tea,coffee and ices were served in the Brown Reading Room. There was music in thePicton Reading Room by the City Police Band and by the Misses McCullagh -Miss Helena McCullagh on the pianoforte, Miss Isabel McCullagh on the violinand Miss Mary McCullagh on the violoncello.

With the museum finally open, Sir William resigned as chairman of the Library,Museum and Arts Committee, and Councillor Frank J. Leslie took his place. Thepartnership of Forwood as chairman of the museum’s governing committee andForbes as director of the museum had proved at least as effective as the three waypartnership of Sir James Allanson Picton, Thomas Moore and the ReverendHenry Higgins. Both Forwood and Forbes were men of energy and enthusiasm,and, though Forwood often appeared to have more ambition for the libraryservice and the art gallery, they produced a museum with ambition to representthe world through its natural history and its human cultures.

With the museum open and Forwood gone, Forbes turned back to increasing thecollections. The new chairman Councillor Leslie announced that over sixteenyears additions to the museum’s collections had averaged 23 for each workingday.

The Library, Museum and Arts Committee contributed £100 towards excavationsin Egypt by the notable and colourful archaeologist John Garstang, who washonorary reader in Egyptian archaeology at University of Liverpool and shortlyto become Professor of Methods and Practice of Archaeology there. But Forbesand Garstang fell out over the distribution of finds from his excavations. Therewere ten shareholders and Forbes complained that most of the museum’s sharewere duplicates, and all were broken into small bits. The committee did notsubscribe to Garstang’s next season of excavations.

In 1909 Liverpool’s Parks and Gardens Committee transferred their BotanicGardens herbarium collections of over 40,000 dried specimens to the museum.They were apparently fearful that the daily routine of maintaining the parks leftno time for the care of this historic collection.

Henry Forbes retired in 1911 at the age of sixty and Joseph A. Clubb wasappointed in his place. Forbes remained active in learned societies and wasawarded the title Consulting Director of Museums to the Corporation, anhonorary post that he held until his death. After he retired Forbes made onemore expedition - the Peruvian Government commissioned him to investigate


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the birds of the Guano Islands and to make proposals for their conservation andfor the economical working of the guano deposits. He died at Selsey on 27October 1932.

Joseph Clubb, the new curator of the museum, was as keen as his predecessor tokeep adding to the museum’s collections. He claimed that over 100,000 itemshad been added to the collections in fifteen years - 89,500 natural history itemsand 11,756 ethnography items. He also made a concerted effort to acquirematerial for the museum’s local history gallery. But his main interest waseducation, and especially working with schools.

School parties were visiting in increasing numbers especially after a Board ofEducation code of regulations allowed museum visits to be reckoned as schoolattendance. The schools loans collections started by Reverend Henry Higgins in1884, now contained over 1,000 scientific objects, and went out to 103 elementaryschools. Joseph Clubb was made joint secretary of a British Associationcommittee looking at education work in museums.

In October 1913 William S. Laverock, assistant in the botanical and geologicaldepartments of the museum, set off for an expedition to Malaya. He was invitedby H.C. Robinson, director of museums in the Federated Malay States. Robinsonwas born in Liverpool and had worked at the museum before moving to Malaya.Laverock travelled for eight months courtesy of the powerful Liverpool shippingcompany Alfred Holt & Co. He brought back many thousands of specimens ofMalayan flora and fauna, mineralogical and geological specimens, as well asnumerous regional artefacts. Laverock later described this expedition as athrilling episode in his somewhat humdrum museum life42.

Clubb set about remodelling parts of the old museum building. First he provideda new and larger case for the seal that had been in the museum for nine years.He ripped out the turnstiles inside the main entrance, improving the welcome tothe museum - but made the counting of visits less accurate. Mahogany partitionswere removed to open up the way from the entrance to the main hall of themuseum. Percy Newberry, Brunner Professor of Egyptology in the University ofLiverpool, was called in to look at the Egypt display in the main entrance hall.

Arnold Ridyard’s gifts of West African material to the museum passed 5,000 justbefore the First World War, and in 1916 made his last donation to the museum

42 1947. ‘Obituary. William Shepherd Laverock (1865-1947)’. North Western Naturalist, vol.21,September-December 1947. pp.285-287 – p.285.


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and retired. At that time he was reckoned to have given, or arranged for others togive 6,450 specimens, 2,481 of which went to the ethnography collections, and3,969 to the natural history collections, including 1,585 for the aquarium. Clubbacknowledged that the West African collections came almost entirely throughArnold Ridyard and had been carried free of charge on ships of Elder Dempster &Co. Ridyard had about 180 contacts along the western coast of Africa, asignificant number of whom were freed slaves or their descendants from theCreole people of Sierra Leone.

In the latter years of the First World War the museum was pressed intoeducational service when several of the Liverpool’s elementary schools wereconverted into military hospitals. The museum’s galleries were used forafternoon demonstrations to large classes of elementary school children.

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Chapter 6 – 1919-1940 - Experiments

Opened in 1900 New Brighton Tower was a towering landmark at the mouth ofthe Mersey on the opposite bank to Liverpool. Like the relatively nearbyBlackpool Tower, it was based on the Eiffel Tower, but was taller than Blackpool’sby about 15 metres. It had only been open for fifteen years when it was closeddown for the First World War. After the war, when the New Brighton TowerCompany came to reopen their tower, they found that its metalwork had beenneglected and had rusted. It could not be opened to the public.

The tower was demolished over three years, starting in May 1919, but before workcould begin, its resident seal had to be rehoused. He had been caught along withseven other seals in the North Sea in about 1916, and was the only one still alive.The New Brighton Tower Company decided to present him to the museum, andthe museum was happy to receive him. The museum’s previous seal had arrivedin 1905 but had recently died leaving his tank empty and ready for a new tenant.The new seal was named Paddy after the man who had looked after him in theNew Brighton Tower, and quickly became a major attraction. He was sleek andsilver-grey, and spent many years at the museum swimming round his tank,usually on his back, gazing at visitors.

The museum opened on Sundays for the first time, though it remained closed onFridays for cleaning, for arranging exhibits and for the use of students. Finally in1922 the last students’ day was abolished and the museum was open seven days aweek.

When the extended museum had opened in 1906, it had a separate room for adisplay of Liverpool history, and planted a seed that was bound to grow. In the1920s the campaign for more Liverpool history was led by the maritime historianRobert Gladstone, great-nephew of former Prime Minister William Gladstone.He campaigned for displays of Liverpool’s maritime history, not just in theexisting museum but in a new shipping museum. Alderman Henry A. Cole,chairman of the Library, Museum and Arts Committee, declared Gladstone’sproposal ‘an excellent suggestion, and one I heartily support, but I would notlimit such arrangements to Shipping’43. Alderman Cole’s suggestion was for amuseum of all of Liverpool’s history, not just its maritime history. However itwas the demand for a new separate shipping museum that was eventually taken

43 Liverpool Committee of the Free Public Museums, 1925. Seventy-Second Annual Report, 1925(Reprint of the General Report and of the Museums’ portion only of the Report of the Committeeof the Free Public Library, Museums and Walker Art Gallery). p.5.


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up first. For the meantime a separate gallery showing ship models and maritimepaintings was opened in the museum in 1931.

Joseph A. Clubb retired in July 1926 and was presented with a gold watch andchain. He had been at the museum for 31 years, starting as assistant curator ofthe Derby Museum in January 1895, and taking over as Director when HenryForbes left in 1911.

The new director, James J. Simpson, was Keeper of the Department of Zoology inthe National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, before he came to Liverpool. He startedwork as museums director in Liverpool on 1 August 1926.

Among Simpson’s first acts was to produce an Old Liverpool exhibition for aspecial Civic Week in 1926, when all three institutions on William Brown Street,the Walker Art Gallery, the library and the museum, stayed open one evening,and attracted an estimated 5,000 people. The open evening was repeated for CivicWeek in the following year. A special exhibition at the museum combinedAfrican ivory carvings, Asian costume and Liverpool clocks and watches, and theopen night attracted over 10,000 visitors to the art gallery, library and museum.

In the same year, the museum attracted 4,729 school children in groups from 40schools and colleges and one orphanage. On these visits one of the curatorsfrequently gave a talk to the group. The museum also kept up its tradition ofsending out specimens on loan to Liverpool schools. In a year 1,642 boxes ofspecimens and 210 sets of lantern slides were sent to 107 colleges and schools.

Museum director Simpson was evidently fond of statistics. In the local paper hecomplained that it cost £3 a week – at least £150 a year – to feed the museum’sseal, which he called Edgar, instead of Paddy as it was originally named. A laterdirector of the museum scoffed at this claim saying the seal cost a mere 14shillings a week to feed.

Though it started well, Simpson’s stay in Liverpool began to go wrong in 1928.The chairman of the Library, Museum and Arts Committee reprimanded him forusing two council workmen for thirteen hours to help him move house, andasked him to pay for their time. A review of the museum’s work by members ofthe Library, Museum and Arts Committee found friction among staff, andSimpson drew criticism for failing to report to the committee that he hadsuspended two of them. Simpson’s next action was to reorganise his staff, with


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the support of the committee, and then, in June 1929, he retired after less thanthree years in the job, complaining of bronchitis and rheumatism.

After he left Liverpool James Simpson went to work in Turkey researchingoceanography and marine biology to improve the country’s fishing industry. Hehad the use of a former Royal palace on the Bosporus, about six miles fromIstanbul, and he set up a marine laboratory on the Sea of Marmora. Then,travelling on the steamer Kyrenia from Greece, he was reported missing earlyone morning in 1936. By early afternoon, after a search of ship, he was given upfor lost, and his disappearance was recorded in the ship’s log.

When Simpson retired, the deputy director, Peter Entwistle, stood in as actingdirector from June to September 1929. Entwistle had started as an assistant forthe Mayer collection in 1876, and was later Keeper of Ceramics and Ethnology.Soon after his stint as acting director, in December 1929, he retired having workedin the museum for 53 years.

The new director of the museum was Douglas A. Allan, and he started at themuseum on 16 September 1929. He was a graduate of the University ofEdinburgh, where he specialised in geology and took part in Arctic expeditions.From 1925 to 1929 he was a lecturer in geology at Armstrong College, Newcastleupon Tyne.

Douglas Allan’s arrival heralded a decade of experiment and development.

The year after he arrived, Allan started winter evening lectures at the museum, atradition that had lapsed for many years. He held them on Fridays in January,February and March and the average attendance was 161. He considered them sosuccessful that the following year he extended the three-month season to sixmonths, running from October 1930 to March 1931.

Allan set about building a team of heads of museum departments – calledkeepers – covering the main areas of the museum’s collections – ethnology,archaeology, vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, botany and geology. The firstof Allan’s new keepers was Harold Stansfield who started early in 1931 and was incharge of botany. In September 1931, Allan appointed three new keepers: TrevorThomas for ethnology, Thomas Eden for geology and Elaine Tankard forarchaeology. Elaine Tankard was proclaimed the first woman keeper in a citymuseum. To complete the team Allan promoted two men who had been startedas assistants at the museum before the First World War; R. Kempton Perry was


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Keeper of Vertebrate Zoology, and C. Hay Murray, Keeper of InvertebrateZoology. The new band of keepers set about introducing new ideas and ways ofworking to the museum.

The new Keeper of Ethnology, Trevor Thomas, carried out a review of theAfrican collections with J. Withers-Gill, a writer and translator who had worked inWest Africa for many years. In 1931, Withers-Gill produced a handbook on theAfrican collections, noting the extraordinary contribution of the late ArnoldRidyard, chief engineer of the Elders Dempster Line. Withers-Gill gave talks inthe museum on Nigeria and its Peoples and Forty-Five Years in West-Africa. Healso supervised the redisplay of African material, with coloured triangles as abackground in some of the display cases contributed by Trevor Thomas, who hadsome singular ideas on displays.

Trevor Thomas put together a loan collection of African material and sent it firstto the museum in Stockport, and it later to Mercer Park Museum, Clayton-le-Moors. He wrote of his enthusiasm for African culture in a way that is shockingtoday.

…we have for a long time wallowed in the jazz, which initially was rootedin West Africa, probably because its strong rhythms made too irresistibleappeal to our thinly veiled sensual primitive natures. But that a “nigger”should be able to show us the way in art values was really too impossible asuggestion.

Fortunately the tide of artistic opinion has become strong in favour ofnegro work, and in the Liverpool gallery many fine examples can beseen.44

Not long after she started as Keeper of Archaeology at the museum, ElaineTankard set up a Children’s Corner. The display was set up in an alcove on theLower Horseshoe gallery, with cases of historic British toys and dolls andcontemporary dolls and toys from countries around the word. Tankard installeda large blackboard map in the Corner, on which she wrote about interestingworld events. She followed up the children’s display with three special afternoonlectures for children at Christmas, with about 250 children reported as attendingeach lecture.

44 Thomas, Trevor, 1935. ‘Wonders of Liverpool Museums; How the Department of Ethnology Aids- The Study of Racial History’. The Liverpolitan, May. pp.29 & 33.


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Rising numbers of children were visiting the museum in school groups. In 1931,8,771 children from 173 schools visited the museum, nearly twice as many as fiveyears earlier. The schools loan service sent out 2,987 specimens to 156 schools.Schools also asked for fish from the museum aquarium for school aquariums andponds, and fish were supplied when possible, as when the museum’s aquariummanaged an enormous hatching of Brown Trout.

The Keeper of Invertebrate Zoology, C. Hay Murray, asked whether visitors werereally learning when they made a trip to the museum. He read a paper at theMuseums Association conference in Plymouth reporting that when he hadquestioned visitors to the museum, ‘they all said they had seen “interesting”things, but admitted they had learned nothing’45. He suggested that museumexhibits should be more directly instructive.

The botany keeper, H. Stansfield, set up what he described as the first Gallery ofEconomic Botany. It was a flowering of the spirit of the British Empire, showingproduce of Empire countries, and suggesting how production of essentialcommodities could be improved with increased European settlement. Theexhibition was opened by Sir John Shuckburgh, Deputy Under-Secretary for theColonies, on 2 July, 1932, and could have been a response to Hay Murray’sconcerns that displays were not instructive enough.

As its collections grew, the museum needed more storage space for items not onshow. Hay Murray’s invertebrate collections got a new store in 1933 when a newEntomological Storeroom was installed in the Upper Horseshoe gallery. Themuseum also got a new storeroom at the other end of William Brown Street - theWalker Art Gallery was closed from May 1931 until October 1933 forrefurbishment, and when it reopened the museum moved into a store in the newextension.

Under Allan’s directorship the museum’s aquarium thrived. A tank of alligatorswas ornamented with hanging baskets of palms to add atmosphere, and anelectric motor was installed to supply compressed air to the fish tanks. Paddy theseal, having been in the museum for fifteen years, was reportedly happy in thecare of museum attendant named Evans, as a newspaper article reported.

Paddy lives almost entirely on herrings. When herrings are difficult toobtain whitings are substituted, but he does not like them nearly so much.

45 1931. ‘Visits to museums: Do people learn anything? Results of a Liverpool investigation’.(Liverpool) Post and Mercury, 11 July.


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At 3.30 every afternoon people gather to see him make very short work of4lbs of herrings. When the Liverpool Aquarium Society werecontemplating adding a seal to their collection some years ago, it wasstated that a seal would cost £5 per week to keep, and would need threedifferent kinds of fish, besides other expensive items. But Paddy costs nomore than 14s a week.

His coat, which he changes every August, is brown for the first week or sothen changes to silver-grey. Although he does not have his coat pressed,he has it sponged down every morning while his tank is being emptied.The toilet over he has an underwater beauty sleep of about fifteenminutes. Some authorities contend that seals do not sleep under water, -they should see Paddy. The extraordinary thing is that he can glidearound his tank when it is empty, with a perfect swimming motion.

Although Paddy is the very soul of good nature he is not without a littlejealousy. Should Mr. Evans look into another tank too long Paddy makes agreat fuss and lashes his water into foam.Thousands of children would not consider their holidays complete withoutpaying Paddy at least one visit.46

Paddy the seal lived on in the museum aquarium until the summer of 1936.

Allan started up a shipping gallery that soon attracted interest and gifts fromproud shipowners. Within a couple of years Allan claimed that his display of shipmodels was second only to that in the Science Museum, London, and was worthyof the Port of Liverpool. By 1935 there had been so many gifts of ship models thatAllan produced part two of a Handbook and Guide to the Shipping Gallery, partone having been issued only three years earlier.

On 18 July 1934, King George V and Queen Mary opened Queensway, the roadtunnel under the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead. Its Liverpoolentrance was – and still is – over the road from the museum, and Allan neededno encouragement to mark the momentous opening with exhibitions at themuseum. An exhibition of geological specimens, plans, diagrams andphotographs showed the stages in the construction of the tunnel, and included ascale model of the spectacular tunnel ventilation system. At the same timeanother exhibition, Tunnelling in Nature, represented the work of animals, birds,

46 1933. ‘Liverpool’s pet seal: Paddy’s life at the museum’. (Liverpool) Post and Mercury, 20September.


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insects and plants in tunnelling. The exhibitions were only meant to last for acouple of months, but they were still open at Christmas.

By February 1935, the museum was becoming so popular that its director, DouglasAllan, was becoming concerned about safety. The Liverpool Daily Post reportedwhen he took the matter to the Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee.

…according to Dr. Allan the number of people who crowd into themuseum on Sundays is becoming unmanageable. Many of the visitors arevery young children, who occupy their time mainly in games of hide-and-seek… It is proposed, therefore, that children must be accompanied byguardians. The limitation of the total attendance at any one time to afigure consistent with both convenience and safety is also apparentlydesirable.

Following complaints of rowdyism and almost unimaginable crowds at theLiverpool Museums on Sundays, Liverpool Libraries, Museums, Arts andMusic Committee yesterday decided to make recommendations to thecouncil…There was only one door by which exit to the street could be obtained, andthe fact that it took twenty to twenty-five minutes to clear the buildingraised a serious position if any accident occurred.

Answering questions, Dr. Allan said that of these 7,000 persons more than3,000 were children whose ages ranged from three to twelve years. Manyof them played hide-and-seek round the cases. A large number of youngmen and women used the museum for promenading, and the number ofpeople who were visiting the museum for the purpose of inspecting theexhibits was less than 4,000.

The committee decided to recommend to the City Council that childrenshould not be admitted to the museums on Sunday afternoons unlessaccompanied by adults, and that when the attendance reached 5,000,further admissions should be regulated according to the numbersleaving.47

Annual figures for visits to the museum are scarce at this date, but seem to havepeaked around 533,320 in 1936-1937. In 1935 the museum building had a major

47 1935. ‘Disorder at the Museum. Sunday Crowd of Nearly 7,000. “Hide and Seek” Round Cases.’The Daily Post, 2 February. p.6.


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overhaul, though it stayed open to the public throughout the works. Thebuilding was rewired with six miles of ducting and twenty five miles of wire, andnew two new emergency exits were installed, one at the front and the other at theback of the building.

In the summer of 1935, Douglas Allan and Elaine Tankard went to Brussels for aMuseums Association conference, with Councillor John Hamilton, a member ofthe Library, Museum, Arts and Music Committee. Allan was elected a memberof the council of the Museums Association, and served on its EducationCommittee. After the conference he went to visit museums in Bremen, Berlin,Dresden and Leipzig.

Meanwhile the magazine Liverpolitan printed a series of nine articles onWonders of the Museum, specifically intended to promote the museum toLiverpool audiences. Each of the museum’s keepers wrote an article on theircollections, and each had their portrait photo above their contribution. A newleaflet about the library, museum and the Walker Art Gallery was targeted atvisitors to the city. Produced in English, French, German and Spanish, the leafletswere sent to hotels and to the Southern Railway Company which operated trainsbetween the Channel ports and London.

The Keeper of Botany, H. Stansfield, remodelled his Gallery of Economic Botanyin 1936 with an exhibition Timber in Aircraft. When it finished, he remodelledthe entire gallery again, and sent the exhibition on tour. Timber in Aircraft wentto Blackburn Museum, Todmorden Museum and Batley Museum. In the sameyear, the museum toured exhibitions to Stalybridge Museum and Art Gallery,Halifax Museum and Clayton-le-Moors Museum, as well as sending Mr. P.H.Naftel’s Collection of Japanese Magic Mirrors to Blackburn Museum.

Lively exhibition activity was complemented by rapid and active collecting. Giftsbetween 1936 and 1937 included Pacific and Inuit material, a collection ofJapanese sword ornaments, rare objects from Borneo, 200 water-colour drawingsof local fungi, and a remarkable list of mounted animals, including two Africanrhinoceros, springbuck, deer, antelope, Thompson’s and Arabian Gazelles, awhite-maned serow, and a young Gorilla from West Africa. R. Kempton Perry,the Keeper of Vertebrate Zoology took special pleasure in the acquisition of aSpoonbill collected at Formby, Lancashire, in 1922. The Keeper of Geology, DavidElystan Owen, set out to build up a study collection of typical British rocks, andcontacted quarry owners all over the country many of whom supplied samplerocks.


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The list of museum handbooks and guides available at this time was impressive.Priced at sixpence were the Egyptian Collection; the African Collection; theShipping Gallery Part 1 & 2; British Birds; British Mammals; the HerbariumCollections; and the Gallery of Economic Botany. At threepence were: ManxCrosses; Cypriote Sculptures; Ægean and Hittite Antiquities; and the TenboschCollection of Delft Ware.

Starting in 1937 and finishing in 1938 the keepers also wrote a new series ofarticles for the Norris Green Association’s monthly magazine, Norris GreenCommunity Life. They were similar to those they had done for the Liverpolitanin 1935, and they were intended to encourage the tenants of the relatively newestate in north Liverpool to visit the museum.

As well as working locally, the keepers set up international links with museumsin Canada, Finland, India and USSR to exchange exhibits. In exchange forexamples of typical British rocks and minerals, museums abroad sent backspecimens which would otherwise have been very expensive to obtain.

In September 1938 the Keeper of Ethnology, Trevor Thomas, set off for a year’sstudy leave in USA financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. He spent most timeat the Museum of Science, Buffalo, and toured to New York, Washington, andPhiladelphia.48

In 1939 plans were laid for a conference of the Museums Association conferenceto be held in Liverpool in 1940, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the firstconference held in Liverpool in 1890. Douglas Allan, director of the museum,and Frank Lambert, director of the Walker Art Gallery, took the lead in the localorganisation of the conference, with help from staff at the Williamson ArtGallery, Birkenhead, and the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. However theplans never came to fruition.

As early as March 1938, Douglas Allan and the chairman, of Liverpool’s MuseumsSub-committee, Alderman Henry M Miller, had been to a conference organisedby the Museums Association on air-raid precautions. When they returned toLiverpool they began to discuss preparations for war.

48 Trevor Thomas left Liverpool to become Director of the City of Leicester Museums and ArtGallery in 1941. There he started a remarkable collection of German Expressionist art. He left in1946 and worked for the Arts Council, UNESCO and Gordon Fraser, the greetings-card publisher.In 1963 he was the last person to see the American poet and author Sylvia Plath before shecommitted suicide.


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In August 1939 preparation for air raids got under way more seriously. Keeper ofGeology, David Elystan Owen, began sorting the more valuable geologyspecimens and putting them in the stronger vaults. Keeper of Botany, H.Stansfield, took all the type specimens of botany and other valuable specimens,and packed them in air-tight and gas-tight metal cases so that they could bemoved quickly. An inner storage vault in the museum, previously used forstorage of anatomical material, was converted into a gas-proof chamber for staff.

When war was declared on 3 September 1939, the museum shut for a fortnight,and staff were trained in fire fighting and dealing with incendiary bombs andhigh explosives. Museum attendants were moved from day shifts to a rota ofthree eight-hour shifts so that the museum was permanently staffed. At the endof 1940, the museum and library staff formed a volunteer fire watch. Betweenfourteen and twenty men went on watch from 6p.m. until 8a.m., with supper,breakfast, and bunk beds provided.

The Walker Art Gallery was requisitioned for Food and Fuel controls, with anAuxiliary Fire Service station in the basement.

All the museum’s windows and cases were covered with mosquito netting to limitdamage from flying fragments. Glass was removed from the inner roofs, andreplaced with wire netting. Sandbags were stacked round display cases and largerexhibits, including ancient Egyptian statues. The walls of some storerooms werestrengthened.

Many museum treasures had been transferred to safer storage in the basementsof the building. Some smaller and more important items were packed up in aninconspicuous box and carried to Martin’s Bank on Water Street, in Liverpool’scentral commercial district. An attendant at the museum, George Youlton laterrecalled taking three of the museum’s great treasures there.

I remember taking some to St Martin’s Bank near the Town Hall. Amongthem were the Mexican Codex or Calendar, the Kingston Brooch – a rareAnglo Saxon find – and the linen girdle that belonged to Ramases theThird. They remained there until we collected them after the war.49

As the months went by arrangements were made with owners of country housesin Cheshire and North Wales to store museum collections and slowly material 49 1971. ‘Nights of Hell/The fish went down the drain’. Liverpool Echo, 21 May.


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was moved out of Liverpool to relative safety of the countryside. Among theitems that escaped to the country were some ship models, the bird skin andherbarium reference collections and most of the museum’s Anglo-Saxonmaterial. But, as Allan said later, there was so much material in the collectionsand there were so many heavy and bulky items, that by far the larger proportionof the collections stayed in the museum.

The aquarium was used as an air-raid shelter. To the disappointment of somevisitors it was closed except to school parties, or people with special permission.Douglas Allan reported that sailors most frequently asked for permission to visitthe aquarium. By the end of 1940 it was hard to obtain food for over 300 fishes,and staff began to transfer some to local lakes and ponds.

By the summer of 1940 numerous European refugees were arriving in Liverpool,especially from France. Elaine Tankard installed a large blackboard in themuseum’s entrance hall, and each day about eleven o’clock in the morning shewrote up a résumé in French of the main news from Liverpool’s Daily Post. Staffalso produced free pamphlets giving a guide to the museum and its collections.

By the autumn of 1940 it was clear that the Museum was a centre ofattraction to Service men of all kinds. Indeed the uniforms of the variousFree Forces tended to outnumber our own, and the Museum co-operatedwith the British Council in numerous activities aimed at helping our war-time guests. In one particular field a notable piece of pioneer work wasachieved on our own – the provision of free four-page pamphlets,describing the general layout of the Museum and directing attention tothe principal exhibits. The first to appear was naturally the Englishversion, and it was followed by others in French, Czech, Polish, Dutch, andNorwegian.50

Some of the senior staff gave lectures to troops in the various camps inLancashire and Cheshire, under a scheme organised by the University ofLiverpool.

Early in 1941, Allan opened an information centre in the museum for the victimsof air raids. The centre was operated with the Citizens Advice Bureau byvolunteers from the museum staff and temporary assistants.

50

Allan, Douglas, 1945. ‘Liverpool watches the War’. Museums Journal, vol. 45, April, p.3.


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The German Luftwaffe singled out Liverpool as one of its most strategic targets,making it a prime target for air raids in the early years of the war. In March andDecember 1940, incendiary bombs burned on the roof of the museum and somecrashed through the glass roof-lights and burned on the floor of the uppergalleries. The night shifts of volunteers and museum and library staff numberedbetween fourteen and twenty, and dealt with the incendiary bombs effectively.Allan reckoned that they could manage half a dozen bombs at a time. In one airraid, high explosive bombs fell near enough to make the watchers on the roof ofthe museum hit the deck. The museum suffered a little damage from the blastand flying debris.

However, the museum’s luck did not last. As it turned out, Allan’s planning andthe preparations of museum staff and volunteers were of little use.

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Chapter 7 – 1941-1949 – Bombed-out

On the night of 3 May 1941 German bombers dropped about 870 tonnes of highexplosive bombs and over 112,000 incendiaries on Liverpool. Buildings andstreets were damaged all over the city. A 500lb. (225kg.) bomb fell on Liverpool’slibrary and museum. Both were burned out.

Douglas Allan, the museum‘s director, described the night’s events.

During the night in May there were nineteen men on duty, under Mr. F.Lambert51. A fairly fresh wind was blowing. The Alert sounded, and oneor more H.E. [high-explosive] bombs fell in a street at the back of thebuildings and one at the bottom of the Museum front steps, with the resultthat most of the glass of the nearby windows and roof-lights was shattered.Sometime later three incendiary bombs fell into the Museum, igniting onimpact with the floors of the Economic Botany Gallery, the PalaeontologyGallery and the Oriental Room. They were all extinguished withoutdifficulty, and the floors were left perfectly safe.

Soon afterwards the roof-watchers saw large flares overhead and saw abomb falling. They flattened out, and an H.E. crashed through the Libraryroof a few yards away, the subsequent explosion shaking the building. Themen immediately descended by an outside turret stair to render aid. Atthe telephone post below, the Deputy Chief Librarian, two others, and aLiverpool Defence Cadet (runner) were seriously injured by blast andfalling masonry, woodwork and books. In the basement two libraryattendants were buried beneath wreckage. Thus six of the nineteen menon duty were incapacitated and it was an obvious duty of some of theircomrades to go at once to their rescue – a duty which became the moreimpelling as a fire started amid the wreckage and gained rapidly on thetrapped men, who were fortunately rescued in time. The combination offire, a building with windows and roof-lights gone, a fresh wind and muchdry paper and woodwork proved far too much for the residue of theVolunteer Fire Guard and other assistance immediately available, and helpwas procured by the second Cadet on duty, who made several trips underconditions of great danger.

Despite all these factors, the Museums’ staff together with the A.F.S. menheld the fire at bay on the ground and upper floors for a considerable

51 Frank Lambert was the director of the Walker Art Gallery.


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time, but in the end their efforts were defeated by the wind, which blewflames and flaming fragments from the Library over the Museum blockand drove the flames from the burning roof timbers along thecorresponding Museum structures. The men were, moreover, threatenedfrom the rear when burning wood fell down one of the ventilator shaftsand started a new fire in the African Basement and the adjoining PacificRoom, a danger which was quite unforeseen. Most unfortunately thePacific Room had been selected as a relatively safe place to which muchvaluable material had been removed, on the assumption that any firewould start at the top of the building. It was completely dry and a series ofboxes, crates, cabinets and cases, raised on bricks to avoid water from hose-pipes, formed an easy prey to the flames, which spread with amazingrapidity. The new fire thus caused the most serious losses, including muchPacific ethnographical material, the planked and ribbed scale models offishing craft, the key pieces of the old Liverpool Pottery collection, theAnglo Saxon bronze bowls and some Egyptian antiquities. This room andthe Old Liverpool Room above, with the Palaeontology Gallery on topwere soon completely gutted.

Meanwhile the fire was slowly creeping along the old-fashioned joists andtimbers covered with lath-and-plaster framework (1860), invisible andinaccessible, until a break occurred and it was too late to save thatparticular section; the roof of the old building fell in. The Horseshoe roof(1906), composed of arched iron girders surmounted by alternate sectionsof glass and slates, capped with a lead-covered wooden top, while theunder surface supported a lath-and-plaster ceiling, presented a dry woodentunnel, barely two feet deep with only a limited number of manholes, tothe advancing fire. It spread rapidly and enveloped the floor and contentsof one arm of the Horseshoe Gallery, both main and upper stories beingaffected. In the other arm, the almost complete wrecking of the cases andexhibits on the top floor was due to the falling of roof debris. Later theFire Brigade were able to prevent the fire spreading to the ShippingGallery and the office block on the main floor, where breeze layersbetween the floorboards served to retard its progress. The former hassuffered considerably from water, but the latter is fortunately intact andserves as a base for salvage operations.52

52 Allan, Douglas, 1941. ‘The Destruction of the Liverpool City Museums; A Review of Events’.Museums Journal, vol. 41, August. pp.105-107.


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No-one was killed, but the museum building was devastated, and the library wascomprehensively burned out with 15,000 books lost. More than thirty years afterthe event Frederick Wilkinson, a museum attendant, spoke about it to a Liverpoolnewspaper.

With staff of the Walker Art Gallery, the libraries and the TechnicalCollege, we formed a fire-watching rota. My duties fell on the week beforethe blitz.

When I arrived at 5.30a.m. on May 4, it was to find the museum in flames.The roof had collapsed and with it a lot of masonry, trapping the fireman’shoses. The main hall with the ventilator shafts and wooden beams hadgone up in flames, and I shall never forget seeing the flames sweepingaround the galleries.53

Galleries in the original 1860 museum building were reduced to scorched andblackened debris. Among the collections which suffered were geology, foreignzoology, entomology, ethnology, and archaeology.

The galleries in the 1906 extension fared better. The shipping, British zoologyand African ethnology were damaged by water and fire, but were salvaged. TheUpper Horseshoe gallery was however left without a roof and was littered withdebris. The Technical College areas under the museum galleries were slightlydamaged, but the building remained intact.

Items that had been taken to the basement for safety were badly damaged when,unexpectedly, fire travelled down ventilation shafts. Many of the more valuableship models had been transferred to the basement and were entirely destroyed.The less valuable ships were left on display and, with three or four exceptions,were unharmed. The important Pacific ethnology material had been divided intotwo lots for safety, and was all destroyed.

In the basement the aquarium suffered. Frederick Wilkinson remembered hishorror at the fate of the fish.

Most of them had been destroyed by fire and smoke. Some were still alive.When I was able, I freed them, swilling them down the drain. I hoped theywould make their way into the river – it was all I could do.54

53 1971. ‘Nights of Hell/The fish went down the drain’. Liverpool Echo, 21 May. p.10.54 1971. ‘Nights of Hell/The fish went down the drain’. Liverpool Echo, 21 May. p.10.


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Another victim of the fire was Sammy the seal. Sammy is not recorded inmuseum papers, but numerous Merseysiders remembered him. He arrived at themuseum some time after Paddy the seal died in 1936, and he reputedly died in thefire on the night of 3 May 1941.

The museum was shut, and remained closed for years to come. The museumbuildings were so badly damaged they could hardly be used. There was also arisk of further air raids. A few staff were rehoused elsewhere in Liverpool, butmost of them, including the director Douglas Allan, and some of the collectionswere transferred to Galltfaenan Hall in the Vale of Clwyd, about three miles fromthe market town of Denbigh, and a mile from the villages of Trefnant andHenllan.

Van-loads of material went to their temporary home during the three months ofJuly, August and September 1941. Some of the native fish including, carp, tenchand perch had been in tanks nearer the outer walls of the museum, and hadsurvived the fire. They were transferred to a small pond at Galltfaenan.

Parts of the collections that had not been evacuated before the war were now sentto country houses and castles in Cheshire and North Wales.

Halkyn Castle, Halkyn, FlintshireNess, CheshireTatton Park, Knutsford, CheshireThe Rookery, Tattenhall, CheshireGyrn Castle, Llanasa, FlintshireMostyn Hall, Mostyn, FlintshireRhewl, Mostyn, Flintshire

The least damaged part of the building, the section above the Technical Collegeand the Horseshoe galleries was roofed over temporarily. The 89th Battalion ofthe Home Guard took over the Upper Horseshoe gallery as a rifle range, andinstalled a Sten gun range into the basement gallery where African collectionshad been shown. The Royal Air Force used the Shipping Gallery for physicaltraining, and the School Health Visitors took office accommodation on the mainfloor.

Board of Trade assessors surveyed the ruins of the museum and awarded the sumof £79,042 7s 1d in settlement of the museum’s War Damage Claim. The FinanceCommittee of the City Council set up a Suspense Fund so that purchases could bemade and repaid later from the money received under the War Damage Scheme.


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Allan gamely professed confidence that rebuilding the collections could bring anew and improved museum. Among the earlier purchases from the WarDamage (Suspense) Account was a collection of shells and geology specimensbought for £200 in December 1942.

At Galltfaenan staff were naturally anxious to install the best possible fireprecautions. The entire electrical installation was rigorously inspected and therecommendations of a long and detailed report were briskly carried out. In casea fire broke out, a huge circular brick tank was built close to the house with amotor pump that was tested every week. The tank held 5,000 gallons of water,which, it was reckoned, would last about forty minutes in an emergency, bywhich time the fire services would have arrived.

The staff at Galltfaenan laboured on the shattered collections and began to amassnew material, not forgetting to take advantage of their stay in the country torecord the local wildlife.

By 1944 Allan was ready with a vision for a new museum in Liverpool, and heproduced an eight page booklet outlining his ideas. He asserted that ‘a museummust be considered first and foremost as an educational instrument, and it is bythe satisfactory performance of that function that the expenditure of public fundsis justified’55. His new museum would be a Museum of Science and Man, with anorderly exposition of everything from astronomy to zoology, ‘leading up to thehighest type of life, man himself...’ The press picked up on his vision for amodern ‘super museum’ with ‘at the entrance an illuminated rotating globe toarouse thoughts of the world spinning in space’56.

Allan had hardly finished outlining his vision before he was off to a new job. Heresigned as director of the Liverpool City Museums on 31 December 1944, andstarted as director of the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, on 1 January 1945.He was replaced by an acting director, R. Kempton Perry, who had started at themuseum before the First World War and worked his way up to Keeper ofVertebrate Zoology in December 1929. He was near retirement when he tookover as acting director of the museum.

55 H.W.W., 1944. ‘City Curator Plans Super Museum.’ Evening Express. 5 July. p.2

56 Allan, Douglas A., (1944). Liverpool City Museums Reconstruction. (undated 8 page booklet)pp.1, 2 & 4.


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The appointment of a new director went slowly. A short list of candidates wasprepared by July 1945 and a final selection made by September. But the selectedcandidate was withheld for war work. Dr Charles F. Davidson as well as being acurator of the Geological Museum in London was also Chief Geologist of theSpecial Investigations Division (renamed the Atomic Energy Division in 1951) andexpert on the location of uranium resources. As the Second World War neared itsend, the race was on to develop the atom bomb and Davidson could not be sparedfor Liverpool. The post was re-advertised in December. In January 1946 theappointment was deferred because no-one suitable could be found.

R. Kempton Perry was therefore still in charge when the time came to return toLiverpool from the wartime country retreat at Galltfaenan. In the summer of1946 staff and collections moved again, this time to the leafy suburbs of SouthLiverpool, at Carnatic Hall. There was initially no plan to open the hall to thepublic. It was simply the assembly point for the collections that had beendispersed to country houses and castles after the blitz.

The council hired Carnatic Hall on a long lease and made some basic adaptationsto the building for the museum staff and collections, including especiallyelaborate precautions against fire. Staff started moving to Carnatic Hall in June1946 and collections followed from July. Among the first to move were shipmodels and mounted mammals and birds from Tatton Park. It quickly becameclear the Carnatic Hall would not be big enough and some of the largest shipmodels were put in stores on Clayton Street, Liverpool. By the middle ofDecember 1946 Galltfaenan was cleared, and staff and collections were installedin their new temporary home.

For a while press stories from Carnatic Hall were resolutely optimistic. Newcollections were being assembled, loans were going out to schools, and thenumber of queries that the staff were answering was increasing. Behind theoptimistic façade it gradually became clear that there were no real plans for anew museum.

In September 1947 there was talk of opening up part of Carnatic Hall, but its fireprotection was inadequate and it needed an extra pipeline to a tank storing 5,000gallons of water. There was also talk of opening up nearby Sudley House to thepublic. Sudley came to the City Council at the end of the Second World War, onthe death of Emma Holt, the daughter of George Holt, a leading Liverpoolshipping magnate. His house, a large Victorian mansion in extensive grounds, isa surviving merchant’s house from the richest period of Liverpool’s history. It is


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unique because Emma Holt’s bequest to the city also included George Holt’sremarkable collection of paintings by British artists. In January 1948 the counciltransferred responsibility for Sudley to its Museums Sub-committee, in order thatit might become part library, part art gallery and part museum. However beforeit could be opened electricity had to be installed. Once the electricity was in, thehouse was opened to the public on 14 April 1949. At first only the ground flooropened with a library in one room and the best of Holt’s paintings in three rooms.The floor of the first floor was not opened as it needed to be strengthened forpublic use. Any display from the museum collections would have to wait.

R. Kempton Perry retired as director of museums, and for a while the museumwas run by the director of the Walker Art Gallery, Frank Lambert. In February1948 only four serious candidates for director of museums could be found fromamong 23 applicants. Two of them withdrew, and only two were left. The onewho won the job was the remarkable John H. (Harry) Iliffe.

Harry Iliffe trained in classics and archaeology at Cambridge and Bangor andwent to Canada in 1927 for his first museum post at the Royal Ontario Museum ofArchaeology in Toronto. In 1931 he moved to Jerusalem as the first director ofthe new Palestine Archaeological Museum. The museum in Jerusalem wasinitiated by two notable scholars John Garstang and James Henry Breasted.Garstang was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool anddirector of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and Breasted was thefounder director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Breastedpersuaded John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to donate two million dollars to set up and runthe Palestine museum. Building work started on 19 June 1930, and Harry Iliffewas appointed to take charge. Iliffe planned exhibits of the development of earlyman and of contemporary Arab culture alongside the ancient archaeology.Breasted objected to Iliffe’s plans to mix contemporary culture and archaeology.Their dispute was referred to an expert committee that upheld Breasted’s viewthat the museum should show only the archaeology. The museum was opened inJanuary 1938. In spite of his spat with Breasted, and in spite of being hit by abullet from an Arab rifle in April 1939, Iliffe remained there until the League ofNations mandate under which Britain ruled Palestine came to an end in 1948.

Iliffe returned from Palestine and took up his duties in Liverpool on 15 November1948. It was a gloomy period. The museum was blitzed almost out of existence.The new headquarters in Carnatic Hall were dark and damp. Faced with such anunpromising present, he wasted no time in planning for the future.


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The main museum building had been flattened but the later additions, the twoHorseshoe galleries were inspected by the City Engineer and Surveyor, andpronounced structurally sound. The council agreed that some of War DamageCompensation could be spent to get them back into use, and Iliffe began todrawn up plans with the city architect and director of housing. There was eventalk of showing museum exhibits in part of the Walker Art Gallery, when it couldbe wrested back from the Ministry of Food.

Several problems emerged. The nurses of the school health service, who hadmoved into the Horseshoe galleries, were reluctant to leave. Museum workshopsand storerooms were an urgent requirement and left little money or space forpublic galleries. Within two months of Iliffe’s arrival, Colonel J.D.R.T. Tilney,chairman of the city’s Museums Sub-committee, reported that it could be at leastten years before even a temporary museum would be opened in the Horseshoegalleries.

In May 1949 the city engineer was sent to negotiate with the War DamageCommission about covering the cost of the work. In November the city architect,Ronald Bradbury was instructed to prepare plans for a reconstructed roof to theUpper Horseshoe, and the refurbishment of the museum steps, the entrance halland Lower Horseshoe.

So began years of thankless planning and campaigning.

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Chapter 8 – 1950-1955 - Closed

Museum director Harry Iliffe began work in his closed museum in a spirit ofcautious optimism. In a lecture to the Liverpool Literary and PhilosophicalSociety he said that he wanted ‘to get a reasonably up-to-date museumfunctioning within the old shell’. His aspirations were limited to the twoHorseshoe galleries, and he estimated the cost of repairing them and access tothem at £50,000. With this as his relatively modest ambition, he accepted that, atleast for the time being, most of the old 1860 museum would remain a ruin andmany important collections would remain in store.

Harry Iliffe and Frank Lambert, director of the Walker Art Gallery, set off in July1950 for a two-week visit to museums in Sweden, Denmark and Holland to lookfor new ideas in gallery and museum design. Also in the group were the cityarchitect Ronald Bradbury, and the chairman of the Libraries, Museums and ArtsCommittee, Alderman Vere Egerton Cotton. When they returned building workto repair the Walker got under way, but Ronald Bradbury’s plans for the museumremained on the drawing board.

Harry Iliffe kept his hand in by arranging exhibitions of photographs ofarchaeological excavations at the Bluecoat Chambers in the middle of Liverpool.His staff, led by Elaine Tankard, the Keeper of Archaeology and Ceramics, at lastgot a few museum items exhibited at Sudley House. On the strengthened firstfloor they put a collection of Liverpool Delft ‘ship bowls’ in one room, a smallarchaeological exhibition in a second room, and loan exhibitions from theVictoria and Albert Museum in a third room. Downstairs at Sudley, Tankardfound a small room to show artefacts from Tibet.

During the summer Iliffe went off for five weeks in June and July on anarchaeological expedition to Paphos on the west coast of Cyprus, the site of afamous temple of Aphrodite. He led the expedition with T.B. Mitford of theUniversity of St. Andrews, and Liverpool City Council contributed a hundredguineas towards the costs. It was the first of six summer excavations that Iliffeled. Each time that he was away Tankard took charge at the museum.

In September 1950 the Ministry of Food finally left the Walker Art Gallery, butinstead of making space for museum exhibits, two galleries on the ground floorwere handed to the library for storage.


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As there was still no progress on reviving the old museum, Iliffe set about plansfor ones – a maritime museum and a ‘folk’ museum. The chairman of the city’sLibraries, Museums and Arts Committee, Alderman Vere Egerton Cotton,announced the council’s decision to allocate a site near Liverpool’s Pierhead for amaritime museum. The maritime historian Robert Gladstone, great-nephew offormer Prime Minister William Gladstone, had been agitating for a maritimemuseum since the 1920s, and in 1940 he bequeathed £25,901 to go towards theestablishment of a museum of shipping in Liverpool. However the bequest andthe acquisition of a site did not produce the museum. The realisation ofGladstone’s dream was still decades away.

Cotton also announced that the council had allocated the ‘Olde Hutte’, atHalewood, near Liverpool, as a folk museum. Iliffe described it as a ‘museum ofrural life’ revealing its inspiration in Reading University’s Museum of EnglishRural Life founded in 1951, and the much older Skansen, the pioneering open-airmuseum located on the island of Djugården in Stockholm, founded in 1891. Iliffemay have visited Skansen on the trip he took to Sweden, Denmark and Hollandwith Frank Lambert and Ronald Bradbury in 1950. He put out appeals for oldfarm implements, cottage furniture and craftworkers’ tools hoping to representdisappearing country life and traditions in the new museum. He planned to saveentire buildings and transport them to the museum. The chosen site, the OldeHutte, was an old moated manor house, now broken down and inhabited by twoold farmers. Disappointingly the building was found to be riddled with dry rot. Itwas demolished in 1960 to make way for the Ford’s Merseyside factory, endingHarry Iliffe’s dream of a rural life museum.

Iliffe maintained a brave face but, apart from his annual excavations in Cyprus,he had nothing but bad news and setbacks. In April 1951 Hugh Dalton, Ministerof Local Government and Planning, refused the council’s application for wardamage compensation for the museum. He claimed that Liverpool had had a fairshare of capital for repairs to the Cathedral gardens, the Town Hall and theWalker Art Gallery. The decision was met with disappointment and resentment,led by Alderman Vere Egerton Cotton, who was taking a year off being chairmanof the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee to be the Lord Mayor.

“It’s a perfect scandal,” he declared, “that a City which has suffered asseverely as Liverpool has suffered, and with collections of such natural,


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scientific and archaeological value, should, for a few thousands of pounds,not be permitted to house and display them in the centre of the city.”57

As the Walker Art Gallery re-opened to the public, Iliffe and city architect RonaldBradbury devised a minimum scheme to get the museum open. War-damagecompensation of a mere £30,000 would, Iliffe declared, open the LowerHorseshoe gallery for displays.

By September the Minister of Local Government and Planning agreed to considera modified scheme costing not more that £10,000. Ronald Bradbury complainedthat £10,000 was not enough, but by November had produced a new minimumscheme with an external staircase leading up to the Lower Horseshoe gallery,avoiding the need to rebuild the old entrance hall. A lift would be too expensiveand so Bradbury proposed inserting a beam so that a block and tackle could beused for heavy exhibits.

As the museum’s campaign to reopen hit this low ebb, Elaine Tankard joined thechorus of complaint about the lack of a museum building. One of her assistantsMiss Broughton had assembled more that 2,000 pieces of pottery brought backfrom Cyprus by Iliffe on his second year’s excavation. In 1952 Broughton told alocal newspaper that she enjoyed the work, and Tankard broke her silence.

”Unfortunately” said Miss E. Tankard (Keeper of the Department ofArchaeology), “much of it will remain in obscurity as far as people inLiverpool are concerned until we have a museum where they can beexhibited.”58

In 1952, while Iliffe was away in Cyprus and Elaine Tankard was acting director,she asked the Museums Association to help to get war-damaged provincialmuseums and art galleries rebuilt. The president cautiously replied that thecouncil of the Museums Association would consider the matter sympatheticallyand decide how to get the best results.

57 1951. ‘Embargo On City Museums “A Scandal”; Committee To Fight; Dalton’s Reasons. ByListener’. Liverpool Echo, 15 June. p.5

58 1952. ‘Ancient pottery forms her jig-saw puzzle. By A “Daily Post” Reporter’. Liverpool DailyPost, 9 September. p.7.


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Several ministers were taken to see the devastated shell of the museum, but thecouncil failed to get government agreement for even a £10,000 scheme to rebuilda small part of it.

In the summer of 1952, city architect Ronald Bradbury came up with a £5,000scheme. A tenth of the size of Iliffe’s original proposal of two years before, it didlittle more than create an entrance staircase and make the museum’s Horseshoegalleries watertight. The tender for the work came in at £6,525, and after severalmonths of waiting the Ministry of Housing and Local Government agreed thatthe council to spend the money.

Ronald Bradbury said, ”This will give you a museum and nothing else. Youcannot expect a Rolls Royce museum”59. Iliffe said, “After several years ofdisappointment and refusals, this achievement is encouraging, but it is notenough. One gallery will be better than nothing but it will not be a museum”60.

The campaign for more money went on with an exhibition Antiquities without aHome was shown at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 1952, and theWalker Art Gallery in 1953. The exhibition showed outstanding items from themuseum’s Joseph Mayer collection, and a selection of recent finds from Iliffe’sexcavations at Paphos in Cyprus. When the exhibition was shown at the WalkerArt Gallery, Elaine Tankard added a room of Tibetan antiquities borrowed from aprivate gallery in London, alongside items from the museum collection.

Three pieces of Etruscan gold jewellery went missing near the end of theManchester showing of Antiquities without a Home. In an unrelated incident atnearly the same time, a museum attendant Francis Grimsley admitted takingantique coins from the debris of the blitzed museum after he was found to havesold twenty seven antique coins to a Wallasey pawnbroker.

In April 1953 work started on Ronald Bradbury’s new flight of steps from WilliamBrown Street up to the Lower Horseshoe Gallery. Elaine Tankard told the DailyPost, “it will be based on the simplest lines, but it is beginning. We have beenfighting for this for twelve years, and we believe that if we can get one gallery

59 1952. ‘£6,525 for initial work on museum’. Evening Express, 12 December. p.3.

60 1953. Annual Reports to the 103rd Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee. p.29.


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open public pressure will persuade the Minister to allow reconstruction of theentire museum”61.

By September the steps were almost finished, but Iliffe pointed out that it wouldtake several months to fit the gallery with showcases and arrange for the firstexhibition. The tender for the showcases had been delayed.

The museum staff continued their campaign to gain recognition for themuseum’s plight, challenging the experts on the television programme Animal,Vegetable, Mineral? to identify exhibits from the museum. The programme’sproducer, David Attenborough, visited the museum to select the items for theshow and it was broadcast on 15 April 1954.

Early in 1954 the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee visited Carnatic Halland the bombed museum on William Brown Street. It was more than twelveyears since the museum was bombed and they were shocked by the deterioratingconditions. It was clear that collections stored at Carnatic Hall suffered fromdamp and dirt, and staff worked in nasty conditions. The ruins of the museumwere just a place for local children to play. The committee asked for a reportfrom the director Harry Iliffe and the city architect Ronald Bradbury.

Another year on and nothing had changed. In 1955, more than thirteen yearssince the museum was bombed and ten years after the Second World War hadfinished, the museum’s collections were still stored in the damp rooms ofCarnatic Hall. A reporter for the Liverpool Daily Post wrote that ‘museumofficials fight a constant battle against mildew, damp and dust…’

I went to Carnatic Hall and walked through room after overflowing roomand sniffed the musty air. I saw ships in the drawing-room in full sailunder crystal chandeliers. A thousand year old mummy lay stiff andbandaged in the hall. There were assegais in the attics and spears, tied upin bundles like giants’ walking sticks, leaning against skin-covered wardrums.

Wardrobes opened to reveal pegs crowded with fine eighteenth-centurycostumes and from the dark interiors of burst brown paper parcels thesheen of faded silk and the glitter of gold-tasselled robes coruscated in thedim light of a single electric bulb. Everywhere, swathed in cotton wool,bedded in straw and sawdust or packed in neatly labelled boxes, lay the

61 1953. ‘City Museum Repair Work Starts Today’. Liverpool Daily Post, 23 April. p.1.


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nuclei of Liverpool’s magnificent collections. Priceless objects of gold andsilver were hidden in haphazard cardboard cartons which had once beendedicated to nothing more exciting than breakfast cereals.

In the course of my tour I saw ample evidence of the ravages of the allpervading damp and dust. The Okapi was splitting at his seams, corrodingpins threatened the well-being of irreplaceable insects and, despite carefulpacking and enshrouding newspapers, the dust has dimmed the fur andplumage of many a mammal and bird…62

Life at Carnatic Hall did not improve, but at last there was activity at themuseum. The building work that started in 1953 was finishing. The LowerHorseshoe was painted in pastel shades, with dove grey walls and white spottedmustard wallpaper. The doors were deep maroon; and the ceiling had sections ofsky blue. Cases had arrived and staff bustled about filling them withspecimens… though there was still no date for an opening.

A new recruit to the museum’s campaign for a new building was Nancy Cunard,the rebellious great-granddaughter of Samuel Cunard, founder of thetransatlantic shipping line. Cunard knew many of the 20th century's mostdistinguished artists and writers, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley andEzra Pound. She was photographed by Man Ray wearing an armful of Africanbracelets; and she produced the vast anthology Negro in 1934, which she puttogether with her sometime lover, the jazz pianist, Henry Crowder.

Nancy Cunard knew about the museum’s African collections from a visit toLiverpool before the war, and now wanted to see them because she was writing abook on African ivories. When she learned that the museum was shut and thateverything she wanted to see had been in temporary storage for years, shepersuaded Henry Moore and Augustus John to write to the Lord Mayor ofLiverpool and to the newspapers to complain63. Then, in May 1955, Nancy Cunardmet Iliffe in France. The meeting led to a visit to Liverpool in January 1956 anddinner at Iliffe’s home in Aigburth Drive, overlooking Liverpool’s Sefton Park.On her way back to London, Cunard called at Manchester intending to lobby theacting editor of the Guardian, but she failed to see him. Over the following

62 Whittington-Egan, Richard, 1955. ‘Threat Of Decay To Liverpool Treasures; They escapedGerman bombs – now the menace is mildew and dust.’ Liverpool Daily Post. 17 June. p.6.

63 Joannou, Maroula, 2004. ‘Nancy Cunard's English Journey’. Feminist Review, vol.78, No.1, 2004,

pp. 141-163 (Palgrave Macmillan), p.157.


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weeks she sent a torrent of letters, beginning with one written on the train backto London and another from her bed in her London hotel. They left Iliffe in nodoubt that Nancy Cunard was determined to support the museum and wantedhim to arrange for the African ivories to be dug out of their store for her. Sheeven offered to buy three of the more important pieces in the museum’scollection, and sent five pounds to get ivories photographed so that postcardscould be produced of them.

In the summer of 1956 a temporary assistant, David Boston, was appointed to sortout the ivories for Nancy Cunard to view. She visited Liverpool to see them inNovember of 1957 wearing ‘an enormous Benin ivory armlet’64. In the meantimeshe travelled all over Europe visiting museums to look at ivories, and sendingpostcards and letters to Iliffe and Elaine Tankard almost everywhere that shewent.

That summer Harry Iliffe went off as usual to Cyprus to continue his excavationsat the Shrine of Aphrodite in Palea Paphos. It was the last of his trips. His healthhad been deteriorating since he was involved in a train crash in September 1951.He was on the London to Liverpool express that left the rails at Weedon,Northamptonshire, killing fourteen passengers and one member of dining carstaff. Then in 1955 he suffered a cerebral thrombosis. At the same time Cypruserupted into violence with a series of bomb attacks by EOKA, the NationalOrganisation of Cypriot Fighters. The British government of Cyprus had beenuninterested in Greek Cypriot calls for Enosis, or union with Greece. The callsbecame more insistent, and explosions targeted government buildings in Nicosia,Limassol and Larnaca. The situation in Cyprus and his increasingly poor healthmeant that Iliffe’s 1955 expedition to Paphos was his last.

Over his six summer expeditions Harry Iliffe had acquired an extraordinarycollection of about 650 Cypriot antiquities for the museum. As he ended hiscareer as a field archaeologist in Cyprus, he prepared at last to open the museumthat he had steered through years of closure.

________________

64 Nancy Cunard’s visit in 1957 was recalled by Keith Priestman in an e-mail to the author of 13March 2010 - ‘I was introduced to her by Elaine Tankard, and I recall that she was wearing anenormous Benin ivory armlet which had been part-burned to a dark brown in the sack of that city.If I had to choose a single adjective to describe her appearance, it would be 'extravagant'.


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Chapter 9 – 1955-1971 – Rebuilding.

The museum formally reopened on 26 January 1956 after 141/2 years of closure.Harry Iliffe’s increasing ill-health nearly prevented him from attending theopening, but his doctor at last gave permission for him to attend. As the LordMayor declared the gallery open, the lights came on in the display cases and themuseum was relaunched.

Ronald Bradbury’s temporary staircase led up the front of the building, andvisitors saw only the Lower Horseshoe gallery, but they reacted quickly andenthusiastically. Nancy Cunard happened to be on one of her visits to themuseum when it reopened and she scribbled a note to Harry Iliffe:-

Today, Saturday, 2 days after ceremonial opening and one day after publicopening of “Lower Horseshoe” your attendant was counting the people asthey came in: by 4p.m – (when I arrived) the number was 2,419 – By 5,when the Museum shut, 2,892. So well over 400 came in the last hour! Avery good sale of booklets too.65

In fact a small part of the museum had opened temporarily some months before.Between 20 June and 12 July 1955, a small exhibition on the tea industry of Ceylon(Sri Lanka) went on show in the Lower Horseshoe gallery. The museum was notthen ready to open but Iliffe had promised the Tea Bureau to put the exhibitionon show in a small room next to the new entrance of the museum. Theexhibition went ahead but as soon as it was over, the museum closed down againuntil the formal reopening.

Outside a painted board listed the contents as ‘Natural History, Archaeology,Ethnology, Shipping’. Inside the first thing on view, in a glass case, was a largefragment of the bomb that set fire to the museum. Next to the bomb was abearded mannequin wearing the clothes of Liverpool-born Charles Evans whenhe was deputy leader on the first ascent of Everest in 1953. Not far away was adisplay of the treasures that Iliffe had brought back from the Shrine of Aphroditeon Cyprus.

The old museum’s thirty-nine smoke-blackened steps still led up to the entranceunder the great portico, still with nothing behind it except ruins. The Museums

65 Cunard, Nancy, 1956. Liverpool notes from NC. Jan 28 1956- ms. one sheet – hand-written inpencil (National Museum of Liverpool).


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Sub-committee had endorsed plans for new building several times, and was stillwaiting for a significant contribution from the War Damage Commission.Ronald Bradbury, the city architect planned a modern building behind theVictorian façade based, he said, on museums in Sweden, Denmark and Holland.It was to have six floors instead of the previous three. In spite of the extra space,at first his plans did not include an aquarium. Inevitably there was a publicoutcry when news that there was to be no aquarium leaked out. It was called a‘scandalous omission’. The pressure was hard to resist and, at the re-opening ofthe Lower Horseshoe, the chairman of the Museums Sub-committee announcedplans for an aquarium and even a planetarium.

Iliffe described the display in the Lower Horseshoe as ‘token exhibition’. ‘This isnot a museum’, he said, ‘but merely a shop window to remind the world of whatthe Museums have and could provide, given a modicum of effective interest andsupport’66. The chairman of the Museums Sub-committee announced to ameeting of the North Western Federation of Museums and Art Galleries that thelack of a museum was ‘a blot on the city’s cultural life and reputation’67. In May1957 the celebrity archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler viewed the ruins of the oldmuseum and pronounced them ‘shocking’68.

Elaine Tankard gave a talk to the Liverpool Soroptomist Club complaining thatthe museum staff had to work in filthy conditions. She warned that themuseum’s collections would be homeless in a couple of years when the leasewould be up on Carnatic Hall and the University took it over to convert the sitefor student accommodation.

In the summer of 1957, Iliffe and Tankard looked on as the Queen Mother laidthe foundation stone of a new central library building behind the library part ofthe façade. They started planning work on the Upper Horseshoe, to providemuseum workshops and storerooms at a cost of £60,917, including £54,000 fromthe War Damage Commission.

With the Upper Horseshoe destined for behind-the-scenes activity and the mainmuseum building remaining a gloomy ruin, the only bit of the museum that wasopen to the public was still the Lower Horseshoe gallery. The Government

66 1956. Annual Reports to the 106th Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee, p.33.

67 1956. ‘The Blot On Liverpool’s Life and Reputation’. Liverpool Daily Post, 29 September. p.7.

68 Eglin, George, 1957. ‘Liverpool’s Priceless Relics Rot In Storage; But there are still no plans for amuseum to house them.’. Liverpool Daily Post, 1 May. p.4.


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resolutely refused to sanction extra money from the War Damage Commission orto allow Liverpool City Council to borrow the money to rebuild the mainmuseum. The council’s determination was hardening year by year. The Leaderof the Council, Alderman John Braddock, announced that he intended to proceedwith the building of the museum and the setting up of a new maritime museum,in defiance of Government’s rebuttals.

But nothing happened and the old museum building remained a ruin.

In the meantime the collections were growing apace.

In 1958 the King’s Regiment (Liverpool) transferred its treasured collections toLiverpool City Council. When the Kingsmen were amalgamated with theManchester Regiment, their barracks in Formby closed and with it theirregimental museum. The collections dated back to the American Campaigns ofthe 1760s.

The shipping collection had grown and had its own curator, E.W. Paget-Tomlinson. He reported that, in spite of losing 100 ship models in the May 1941blitz, the collection numbered over 400 models and about 100 oil paintings. TheLiverpool company Littlewoods had offered the museums a rent-free building inHemans Street, Bootle, north of Liverpool, and most of the ship models werestored there. Littlewoods also helped to organise a shipping exhibition as part ofthe celebrations for the 750th anniversary of King John’s Liverpool charter in 1957.The exhibition was held in Littlewoods Central Clubrooms, Dale Street,Liverpool, for two weeks in June and attracted 56,000 people.

A month before the exhibition, one of the museum’s ship models was sent to starin a Pinewood Studios film about the Titanic disaster. The 19 metre long modelwas made by Harland and Wolf, Belfast, and at various times it has representedthe Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic. The film, A Night to Remember, wasreleased in 1958 and won a Golden Globe Award for ‘Best Foreign Film’ in 1959.

In 1959 Elaine Tankard and her assistant David Boston brought film and sound tothe museum’s displays for the first time. They set up a film of Inuit artefactsalongside two cases displaying mannequins of an Inuit family. They alsopartitioned-off an area where school parties could watch films, withcommentaries on tape recorders donated by local supporters. Tankard andBoston went on to install film and sound into a Civic Exhibition held at the


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Walker Art Gallery in 1960, and a year later Boston left to work at the BritishMuseum.

Harry Iliffe, having suffered ill health for several years and disappointed that hehad not seen more than one gallery of the museum open, handed overmanagement of the museum to Elaine Tankard at the end of 1958 and resignedhis post from 31 March 1959. For ten years he had planned the reconstruction ofthe museum, but had achieved far less than he had hoped.

Tankard was Keeper-in-charge of the Museums for about a year, and thenThomas (Tom) Andrew Hume started as director. He came from north-eastEngland, and had been navigator on bombers in the Second World War. Afterthe war he worked at Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, and at Buckinghamshire CountyMuseum, Aylesbury, before moving to Liverpool on 1 January 1960.

In March 1960 the rebuilt Library opened. In September Tom Hume and thecouncil’s architect Ronald Bradbury announced new plans for the rebuilding ofthe museum. The new scheme was for a steel-framed building with five floors,one less than Bradbury’s 1955 proposals. The cost was estimated at £500,000, butthe scheme was split into two phases. The first phase was an L-shaped linking theold façade to the restored Horseshoe galleries at an estimated cost of £250,000.The second phase was for new galleries built on the footprint of the old museum.Of especial interest to the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee were theproposals for the aquarium, which, members noted, was one of the most popularfeatures of the museum in pre-war days.

Within weeks the Minister of Housing and Local Government said that he wouldconsider loan sanction for the project when a list of tenders has been submitted tohim. Tysons (Contractors) Ltd. submitted a tender for £280,340 for the first phaseof the rebuilding and the city’s Finance Committee agreed that rebuilding couldstart, but only on condition that no money was spent before 1 April 1961.

Tom Hume was furious at the delay. He said, “Our valuable relics, and indeedthe staff, are in museum 3-D condition – darkness, dust and damp”69. He claimedthat the decision to defer a start on the rebuilding the museums by six monthscould be disastrous for the collections. He cited especially the recently acquiredInce Blundell marbles, a really exceptional collection of ancient and 18th centurysculpture, which were stored in the cavernous basements of St. George’s Hall,

69 1961. ‘The 3-D threat in city museums, by Our Municipal Correspondent’. Liverpool Daily Post, 14October. p.7.


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over the road from the museum. Tom Hume’s dismay was understandable, butmisplaced. Within a year of starting work in Liverpool he had seen obstaclesremoved which had frustrated others for years.

A year after he had started as director, Hume created a new department ofconservation, the first in a regional museum. The new Keeper of Conservation,Keith Priestman, set up a Centre for Archaeology for the new North WestMuseum and Art Gallery Service, which meant his staff would also be availableto museums outside Liverpool.

Two years after Hume started as director, live exhibits returned to the museumwhen bees were installed, and the museum’s first schools museum officer, D.E.Hogan, was appointed to work on group visits by schools and colleges.

In April 1962 work finally began on phase one of rebuilding the museum…

…and the Leader of the Council, Alderman John Braddock, backed plans for amaritime museum. He allocated to the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee,a site for the new museum near Liverpool’s Pier Head.

Even the damp and dark Carnatic Hall took on a more optimistic atmosphere asstaff prepared exhibits for phase one of the rebuilt museum with a new sense ofpurpose.

In April 1963 the Earl of Derby unveiled a plaque to commemorate the start ofthe rebuilding of the museum and took a guided tour, as a young volunteerrecalled many years later.

When he and his entourage came into the zoology department, I was inthe process of skinning a rook. I looked up and smiled as they crowdedround me and asked me some questions. I responded as best I could but Iwas a bit overcome and my words came out with difficulty. Somephotographers were also there and took pictures for the local newspapers.After I saw the photographs in the papers a few days later, I found thatLord Derby had been accompanied by Alderman D.J. Lewis, The LordMayor of Liverpool; Mr. Hume, the director of the museum; and someoneknown as Alderman J. Maxwell Entwhistle. It had been an exciting

experience70.

70 Gilbert, Susanna, 2009. Memoirs, typescript. Chapter 8, ‘Southport – The Museum, The Zoo andThe Field’. Sent to World Museum by Susanna Gilbert (née Davey, in 2009.


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Ronald Bradbury’s L-shaped phase one of the rebuilt museum would link the oldmuseum façade with the surviving Horseshoe galleries. It would contain anaquarium and a lecture theatre, as well as some galleries, laboratories and offices.Staff worked enthusiastically on designs and scale models of galleries for the newbuilding. The four new galleries would be Liverpool - A changing city, Earthbefore man, The history of the ship, and a more general gallery of treasures fromthe collections. Tom Hume had a clear and ambitious vision of what themuseum should be able to do:-

Provision of comprehensive source material illustrating the developmentof the earth; growth of all life on it, and civilisations and crafts, and workof man; has been recognised as a main duty of Liverpool’s museum71.

As work progressed on the rebuilding of the museum, the lease was up onCarnatic Hall, and staff had to move the collections out. It took some months toshift them to temporary warehouse accommodation.

On 2 February 1966 Elaine Tankard retired and her assistant Dorothy M. Slowtook over as Keeper of Archaeology. Tankard had worked at the museum formore than 35 years, and had acted as director several times, but she slipped awayquietly only weeks before the old museum at last began to reopen. She hadreputedly fallen out with museum director Tom Hume.

On 25 March 1966 Prime Minister Harold Wilson took an hour off his electioncampaigning to open the first phase of the rebuilt museum.

The public reacted enthusiastically and attendance for the following year wasdouble that of previous years. Tom Hume claimed to ‘have the highestprovincial museum attendance figures’72. The only complaint, and one thatpersists today, came from architecture specialists who complained that RonaldBradbury’s top floor projected beyond the top of the 1860 building and spoiled theskyline of the historic William Brown Street façade.

Tom Hume announced plans for the next phase of building. Work had alreadystarted on site and he highlighted transport and astronomy galleries, and aplanetarium.

71 1965. Liverpool annual report of the museums, p.5.

72 1967. Liverpool Echo, 21 February.


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The museum’s education programmes reached a peak after phase one wasopened. School visits increased in one year by a third to 13,600, and educationstaff started film sessions and quizzes for school holidays. But in April 1967 a firebroke out in the Technical College damaging displays in the Lower Horseshoegallery and requiring the education and conservation staff to move from theiroffices. The education staff who had offices in the Technical College wererelocated to a temporary office constructed on the Lower Horseshoe which hadbeen closed for repair.

In 1968 the repaired Lower Horseshoe gallery reopened with natural historydisplays and an exhibition gallery. The first exhibition Life in the Sand Dunes,focused on the Ainsdale Sand Dunes National Nature Reserve, Southport, a rarehabitat just to the north of Liverpool.

Vending machines with drinks and snacks were installed in the basement, while atypical shopping trip for aquarium food was listed as – ‘A dozen oxhearts, twentypounds of squid and fifteen lettuce and a liberal supply of maggots and mealworms’73.

In 1969, the museum was taken over by a new Arts and Recreation Committeereplacing the long-standing Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee. Shortlyafterwards, following a report on the city’s organisation by managementconsultants McKinsey & Company, the museum was transferred temporarily tothe council’s General Purposes Committee, and then to an Arts and CultureCommittee. As the museums shifted between committees, the newly appointeddeputy director Neil Cossons brought in new procedures for staff, and themuseum took over the maintenance of the whole of the building, though it wasstill partly occupied by the College of Technology. At last the museum couldsort out the damage from the 1967 fire and get the education and conservationstaff back into their offices and workshops.

In 1970 the College of Technology was amalgamated with other colleges to formLiverpool Polytechnic, but still, though the maintenance of the building wascarried out by the museums, most of the office and behind-the-scenesaccommodation continued to be used by the new Liverpool Polytechnic.

73 Sizer, C and Murphy, D, 1968. ‘Sea-horses from Singapore’. Liverpool 68, City of Liverpool PublicRelations Office, pp.1-3.


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The rebuilding was finally completed and the museum was handed over by thecontractors. The ruins left by the 1941 blitz had finally been cleared and the newmuseum building behind the façade of 1860 was finished.

The next job was to fill it with displays. The director, Tom Hume, was eager tocreate a comprehensive modern museum. He was keen that the museum shouldtackle modern science and technology and he set up a new AstronomyDepartment early in 1969. Staff worked on new galleries of land transport, timeand space, and on a planetarium.

The rebuilt museum was launched in January 1970 with a display of moon rockbrought back by the Apollo 11 crew. More than 32,000 people saw the rock duringits three-day showing. At times a queue stretched hundreds of metres outside themuseum.

The head of the museum’s new Astronomy Department, Pat Sudbury, managedthe new planetarium. After some initial difficulties with the £5,000 Zeissprojector, he put on experimental shows to invited parties of children and adultsfrom March 1970. The planetarium finally opened to the public on 22 May; showsfor schools began nine years later in 1979. The Planetarium seated 67, and was,Sudbury claimed, the first English public planetarium outside London74.

Sudbury began collections of astronomy and science, particularly space rocketryand telescopes, and created the new Space gallery next to the Planetarium. Overthe next few years he investigated oceanography, modern physics, photography,scientific instruments and medicine, some of which grew into significantcollections.

The revived museum was the major attraction for the Museums AssociationAnnual conference to Liverpool in 1970.

While the café in the Walker Art Gallery was being repainted, the operationtransferred to the museum for a two-month experiment. It did not work well andplans for permanent catering in the museum were shelved.

In July 1971 a Port of Liverpool Gallery opened on the ground floor of the rebuiltmuseum. Other successes of the year were the temporary exhibitions. Two ofthem, Apollo 10 and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, were exceptionally popular andtook the number of visits to an unprecedented 647,767 in the year. The complete 74

Armagh Planetarium opened on 1 May 1968.


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list of the year’s exhibitions was Computer Art, German Theatre, Apollo 10, WaveMotion, Carbon Fibres, Atomic Energy and The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

Apollo 10, the spacecraft from the fourth manned mission in the Apolloprogramme and the second to orbit the moon, was brought to Liverpool for aSpace Feature in the Liverpool Show, an annual summer event on WavertreePlayground (locally known as the Mystery) in south Liverpool. After three daysat the Liverpool Show the Apollo 10 capsule was exhibited at the museum.

The BBC exhibition The Six Wives of Henry VIII followed the broadcast of thewildly successful six-part historical drama, and was shown for three months inthe museum.

In 1971 Neil Cossons resigned as deputy to become director of Ironbridge GorgeMuseum. Then, after twelve years as director, Tom Hume was approached tobecome the first director of the new Museum of London. He took the job andworked there until a year after it opened in 1976.

In Liverpool, in the absence of both director and deputy director, the energeticPatrick Sudbury was made ‘acting director’ of the museum until a newappointment. Geoffrey D. Lewis arrived from Sheffield to start as the newdirector of Liverpool’s museums on 1 August 1972.

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Chapter 10 – 1972-1993 - Expanding

Ted Heath’s government planned a new tier of local government, ‘metropolitancounty councils’, around larger cities of England. On Merseyside a new countycouncil would take over some powers from district councils. The running ofmuseums could either go to the new county council or stay with the districtcouncils. The Merseyside councils, including Liverpool City Council, came upwith a mixed arrangement with the museum and the Walker Art Gallery formingthe nucleus of a new county service, and district councils retaining the option torun their own museums and galleries if they wished.

On 1 April 1974 the new Merseyside County Council went live. The museum andthe Walker Art Gallery were transferred from the City Council. Both directorsreported to the new County Council Arts and Culture Committee, but themuseum and the gallery continued to be run separately. The director of theWalker Art Gallery, Timothy Stevens, was responsible for the Walker Art Galleryand Sudley House. Geoff Lewis, director of Merseyside County Museums, wasresponsible for the museum, Speke Hall and Croxteth Hall and Park. Thechange from the City Council to the County Council gave Geoff Lewis thechance to review the museum staffing structure, a job that uncertainty over thefuture had deferred since his appointment nearly two years earlier.

The new governing committee quickly gave the museum a new name -Merseyside County Museum - but their attention focused more on new museumsites. Attempts to plan a new maritime museum continued in the background,but of immediate concern were two historic houses on the outskirts of Liverpool,Croxteth Hall to the north-east and Speke Hall to the south.

Croxteth Hall, together with 500 acres of farm, woods and parkland had come tothe city from the estate of the last Earl of Sefton in 1972. The estate presentedmuseums with new challenges of land management and Lewis responded with astrategy emphasising environmental conservation. He stored larger museumexhibits, especially rocketry and land transport, in the more secure farmbuildings. The Hall itself was unfurnished and there were problems with makingit ready for the public. In any case, the Arts and Culture Committee found thatthey could not afford to open it. On 21 January 1975, they debated, and turneddown, a motion that the museums should sell stored collections to provide themoney to open Croxteth Park. Eventually the hall and its walled garden wereopened for summer seasons, and Lewis was authorised to sell crops producedthere to help cover the costs.


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The City Council had taken on the lease of Speke Hall, an extraordinarily fine16th century house, from the National Trust towards the end of the Second WorldWar. Responsibility for Speke was given to the director of museums in 1970 andso, when the County Council took over the museums, it took over Speke as well.The lease gave the County Council full responsibility for repairs, and a structuralsurvey led to a five-year, government subsidised restoration programme costingover a million pounds.

The Walker Art Gallery was also expanding. The trustees of the Lady Lever ArtGallery in Port Sunlight approached the County Council to take over theirgallery. The gallery is the centrepiece of the picturesque garden village built byWilliam Hesketh Lever, Lord Leverhulme, alongside his soap factory. He builtthe gallery to house his spectacular and wide-ranging collection and dedicated itto the memory of his wife, Elizabeth. It had run as a trust since it opened in 1922,but on 30 June 1978 Merseyside County Council took over as sole trustee of theLady Lever Art Gallery and it became the responsibility of the Walker ArtGallery.

Back at the museum the key priority was to complete the displays in the rebuiltmuseum. Slowly new galleries opened up. The Port of Liverpool gallery openedin July 1971, and natural history galleries opened in 1973. A new aquarium and aland transport gallery went into the basement. An antiquities and ethnologygallery completed the main display floors of the museum in 1976, thirty fiveyears after the museum had been bombed.

Meanwhile, in 1973, education staff got back into the suite of rooms in the oldTechnical College that had been damaged in the fire of 1967, and their workexpanded with thousands of schoolchildren visiting the museum in groups.

On 31 December 1977, after a little over five years in Liverpool, Geoff Lewisresigned to become director of the Museum Studies Department, University ofLeicester. Richard A. Foster, the director of Oxfordshire County Museum Service,took up the post of director of Merseyside County Museums.

Foster, aware that the new Merseyside County Museums needed to serve districtsoutside Liverpool as well as the city, continued the increase the number ofmuseums. He agreed with Knowsley Borough Council to set up a museum atPrescot, to the east of Liverpool. Prescot had been an important centre for craftworkshops producing parts for clocks and watches until factory-produced watchesfrom the USA and elsewhere in Britain put them out of business. Foster agreed


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that the museum’s important horological collections would be housed in the newmuseum in Prescot, and that the County Council would make an annual grant toKnowsley Council. The County Council helped Knowsley to acquire a formerNational Westminster bank and fit out a display from the horology collection onthe first floor. It opened as Prescot Museum in 198275.

Richard Foster’s most significant expansion of the museums was in the centraldocks of Liverpool. Since the early eighteenth century the docks had beencentral to Liverpool’s trading wealth, but by the 1970s they were abandoned andtheir warehouses were derelict. This legacy of architecture and engineeringstretched along several miles of the Mersey and needed new uses.

In 1973 Building Design Partnership had carried out feasibility study on the use ofthe Albert Dock warehouses to house the dispersed parts of the LiverpoolPolytechnic, and a wing of the dock buildings was earmarked to be a maritimemuseum. The scheme would have brought a double benefit to the museums: itwould remove the Polytechnic from the museum building on William BrownStreet, and provide a waterfront site for the maritime collections. It waspresented to the city council, but floundered through lack of political will.

In 1974 the new County Council’s Arts and Culture Committee had set up aMaritime Museum Advisory Committee. But it had made no real progress onreclaiming the Albert Dock.

At the end of the seventies, Richard Foster appointed Martyn Heighton as projectmanager and then assistant director, to work with him to create the maritimemuseum that had been dreamed of for the last 40 odd years. On 18 July 1980,Foster and Heighton took the first step towards their goal, opening stage one ofthe Merseyside Maritime Museum in the Pilotage Building and Boat Hall, justnorth of the Albert Dock. Charges of 60p for entry were meant to help cover thecost of the new museum. Closing at the end of a successful season, the museumreopened permanently the following year.

Soon after Margaret Thatcher’s government had come to power in 1979, MichaelHeseltine, Secretary of State for the Environment, announced new urbandevelopment councils for Liverpool and for London. In 1981 he set up theMerseyside Development Corporation to regenerate the docks of Liverpool,

75 The arrangement between the museums and Knowsley Council came to an end in 2008, thoughPrescot Museum remained open with its display of clocks and watches, many of them on loanfrom National Museums Liverpool.


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Bootle, Wallasey and Birkenhead. In the same year tensions in Liverpool eruptedin Toxteth, when a heavy-handed arrest turned into full-scale rioting over ninedays. Heseltine focused on Liverpool in response to political and social turmoilin the city.

Foster and Heighton secured support for stage two of their plan - a new maritimemuseum occupying Block D, the whole of the north side of Albert Dock. Theproposal proved to be an important catalyst for the revitalisation of the AlbertDock, and Foster managed to secure significant buildings and two dry docks forthe museums. In addition to the Pilotage Building and Boat Hall, he acquired thehistoric Canning Graving Docks, the Cooperage, and the Piermaster’s House, allprominent properties in the key central dock area.

Though the building was still being renovated, the expanded MerseysideMaritime Museum was hurried into Block D, in time for the visit of the Tall ShipsRace to Liverpool in 1984. Full sized ships were acquired for display in museum’sdry docks - the 700 ton Liverpool Pilot Cutter Edmund Gardner and the schoonerDe Wadden.

In April 1979 the locomotive Lion, a prime exhibit in the museum’s transportgallery, was sent to Ruston Diesels Ltd. for restoration. It came back into serviceas the oldest working locomotive in the world. Lion led the procession at the re-enactment of the Rainhill Trails in 1980 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of theLiverpool & Manchester Railway, and for several years worked on variouspreserved railways.

In 1979, the museum had its first visitor-operated computer game – one of theearliest to appear in a museum. A Commodore PET (Personal ElectronicTransactor) computer was set up with an animal identification game in anevolution exhibit76. Also in 1979, the museum put a Mobile Exhibition Service onthe road. Developed with government funding, it consisted of a Landrover and anexhibition in a caravan on retractable wheels which was taken to the schools ofthe inner city. There, museum education staff ran sessions in the exhibition andclassroom. The first show was entitled Treasures of the Museums and wasfollowed by many more until the service was retired in1991.

76 Foster, Richard & Phillips, Philip, 1988. ‘New applications for computers in the NationalMuseums and Galleries on Merseyside’ - chapter 18 in Roberts, D.A., ed. Collections managementfor museums. p.127.


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In 1983 a Government White Paper Streamlining the Cities proposed the abolitionof Metropolitan Counties. The proposal heralded the end of the end ofMerseyside County Museums, and raised a question about whether the museumsand galleries would stay together in a unified service, or be split up among thedistrict councils.

Richard Foster argued that the last ten years had demonstrated the benefits of ‘atightly-integrated service with the resources of the County Museum being madeavailable to all outlets in the economic provision of management, conservation,design and educational services’77.

The main concern was the future of the Walker Art Gallery. A case was madethat its collection should be a national responsibility because of its pre-eminentquality. An early proposal gave responsibility for the Walker to the Trustees ofthe Tate Gallery, making it an offshoot of the Tate Gallery, London. But LordGowrie, the Minister for the Arts, said on a visit to Liverpool that he wouldconsider a board of trustees independent of the Tate and representing localinterests.

County councillors were also concerned about the other art galleries. As well asworrying that Militant city councillors might sell the Walker’s art collections,they thought that the district councils would fail to keep up the Lady Lever ArtGallery and Sudley House. Discussion focused on the art galleries and there wasless concern for the museums and their collections. The arguments went on fortwo years and then the Greater London Council, and the metropolitan countycounties, including Merseyside, were abolished in 1986.

In the interim, in spite of the uncertainty, Foster continued to expand themuseums service. In 1984 he bought the Lancashire County Sessions House, aporticoed Victorian building next to the Walker Art Gallery, for £55,000. With theactive encouragement of Merseyside County Councillors, he established aMuseum of Labour History there. It was devised and developed by LoraineKnowles, formerly head of the Prescot Museum, and it opened on 25 March 198678.

77 Merseyside County Council Proceedings of the Council and Committees, 1983-1984 part 2 (M352MIN 2/1/13) – Arts and Culture Committee (special meeting), 16 November 1983, Joint Report ofDirector of Art Galleries and, Director of Museums, Director of Development and Planning,County Solicitor and Secretary and County Treasurer, 3B enclosure 3, pp.1-10.

78 The Museum of Labour History was open in the County Sessions House on William BrownStreet until November 1991, when it was closed to make way for the planned Museum ofLiverpool Life on the waterfront.


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Foster also opened up the museums’ collection of ‘large objects’ stored in twosheds, the former Irish ferry terminal on Princes Dock just north of Liverpool’sPierhead. The stores were opened experimentally on Sunday afternoons duringthe summer of 1985, and attracted 13,000 visitors in 15 days. The Large ObjectsStore was formally opened in April 1986 and showed roughly-displayed rockets,telescopes, vehicles such as the Mersey Tunnel scrubber and the Liverpool LordMayor’s coach, equipment and machinery from local industries and craftworkshops, and salvaged bits from buildings.

For the next season, beginning in April 1986, a major attraction at the LargeObjects Store was the hands-on centre, Technology Testbed, the brainchild of PatSudbury, assistant director of museums, Adrian Jarvis, Keeper of Transport, andEducation Officer, Paul Rees. Inspired by the new interactive science centremovement in Canada and the USA – as reported on by Julian Ravest, Keeper ofPhysical Sciences after his visit there in the early 1980s – Technology Testbedfeatured educational and entertaining home-made mechanical interactiveexhibits. In the 1987 season the Large Object Store attracted 60,000 peoplebetween April and September, many of whom visited in school parties. However,in 1989 the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company sold the Prince’s Dock shedsthat housed the Large Object Store. The experiment was short-lived, inventiveand ramshackle, and is still remembered in Liverpool thirty years after it closed.

Alongside Foster’s more visible activity in the last years of the county council, hewas engaged in a behind-the-scenes campaign to achieve not just a governmentgrant for the museums, but full status as national museums and galleries. Hefound himself at the centre of an intensive period of lobbying, especially of LordGowrie, the Minister for the Arts, during the two critical years between 1983 and1985. Gowrie was convinced that, given the outstanding quality of the collectionsin the Merseyside museums and galleries, they should be given national status,but he resigned as Minister for the Arts in 1985, because, he said, he could not livein London on the £33,000 salary for the job. His successor, Richard Luce,announced in Parliament on 13 February 1986 that the Queen had approved theMerseyside Museums and Galleries Order 1986. The order created a new nationaltrustee body bringing the museums on Merseyside into the august club ofnational museums that included the National Gallery, the British Museum andthe Victoria and Albert Museum.

National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside were, and still are, the onlyEnglish national museum based outside London. A new Board of Trustees wasset up and included Sir Leslie Young, former chairman of the Merseyside


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Development Corporation, and two former county councillors Benjamin Shawand John Last.

Veteran Labour councillor Ben Shaw was chairman of Merseyside CountyCouncil in 1984, the year of the opening of the Maritime Museum on the AlbertDock, and the year when the Tall Ships Race and the International GardenFestival were in Liverpool. He was also the founding chairman of the Friends ofMerseyside Museums and Galleries.

John Last, more than thirty years younger than Shaw, was a Conservative andtook over as chairman of Merseyside County Council Arts and CultureCommittee when the Tories swept to power in 1978. He was a Littlewoodsexecutive whose work on arts and culture was supported by his boss, the greatpatron of the arts Sir John Moores. Last’s membership of the board of theMuseums and Galleries Commission and particularly his contact with theConservative Government were undoubtedly important factors in winningMerseyside national status for its museums and galleries.

Richard Foster was now director of National Museums and Galleries onMerseyside. For the first time in their long history the Walker Art Gallery andthe museum were under one managing director. Timothy Stevens, director ofthe Walker became Foster’s deputy. He left in August 1987 to be Keeper of Art atthe National Museums of Wales.

Speke Hall and Croxteth Hall were separated from the museums, the lease onSpeke reverting to the National Trust, and Croxteth to be run by the CityCouncil.

The museum, renamed Merseyside County Museum in 1974, was renamed againnow that Merseyside County Council had gone. Richard Foster suggestedLiverpool Museum or William Brown Street Museum. The new trustees choseLiverpool Museum, on the grounds that people called it that anyway.

An early and difficult job for Foster was a reorganisation of the staff for the newNational Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. The museum and the artgalleries had operated entirely separately. The two staffing structures needed tobe integrated and simplified. Foster drafted in civil servants from London to helphim. The Office of Arts and Libraries set up an Establishment Review Committeewhich was briefed to recommend how many posts were necessary for the neworganisation. They delivered their report in January 1987 saying that out of a total


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of 557 permanent and seasonal posts, only 392 posts were necessary. The report’srecommendations proved unpalatable and there followed two years ofnegotiations before staff were transferred from local government to civil servicepay and conditions on 1 April 1989.

Foster began planning to expand the museum. He approached LiverpoolPolytechnic and he asked if they would hand over the three floors they occupiedunder the Horseshoe galleries. He was rebuffed but nevertheless commissionedarchitects Brock, Carmichael & Associates, Liverpool, to carry out a feasibilitystudy looking at options to expand the museum.

An exhibition What’s in Store piloted the showing of stored collections in largenumbers, and led to a hands-on area in the museum, at first for an experimentalfive weeks during the summer holidays of 1987. The Natural History Centre had10,000 specimens available for inspection in drawers, and demonstrators to assistvisitors. It attracted 20,268 visits and led to a permanent centre that was openedin July 1989 by Tony Soper, naturalist, film-maker and co-founder of the BBC'sNatural History Unit. The Natural History Centre rapidly started collectingawards including National Heritage’s Museum of the Year Award for the bestEducational Initiative, and the Shell/Times Museum Professional of the Yearaward for Curator of Palaeontology Phil Phillips. Its example inspired similarcentres from Canada to the Netherlands.

Computerisation of collection records was then new to museums but staff at themuseum were early adopters. By 1988 they had computerised a remarkable70,000 records of items in the geology collections. They had 37 computers forcollection documentation and word processing, ‘with a further dozen or so usedfor other tasks’79.

In 1988 Foster announced his plans for a new staff structure to come into effecton 1 April 1989. The new staff structure would be in four new divisions and eachwith a ‘designate’ head. He appointed Eric Greenwood as Keeper of the museum;Julian Treuherz as Keeper of Art Galleries; Mike Stammers as Keeper of theMaritime Museum; and Jim France as Keeper of Conservation.

Foster was also working on big plans for his museums. His most ambitious planwas for the enlargement and improvement of the museum, but he also needed a

79 Foster, Richard & Phillips, Philip, 1988. ‘New applications for computers in the NationalMuseums and Galleries on Merseyside’ - chapter 18 in Roberts, D.A., ed. Collections managementfor museums. pp.127 & 128.


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new store to house reserve collections displaced by new galleries at the museumand from the Large Object Collection when the lease ran out and it closed inOctober 1989. His most contentious plan was for a new Museum of Liverpool Lifeto replace the Museum of Labour History.

The Museum of Liverpool Life was to go in two of the museums’ historicbuildings near Albert Dock – the Pilotage Building and the adjacent Boat Hall.The proposed closure met with resistance. The first objection was that the newmuseum was to have an admission charge whereas the current Museum ofLabour History had none and was therefore open to a wider audience. Fosterresponded by announcing concessionary entry to the Merseyside MaritimeMuseum and a series of consultative meetings. The Museum of Labour Historywas to close on Sunday 3 November 1991, with the concessionary admissionscheme at the Maritime Museum coming into operation on Monday 4 November1991.

But the campaign against closure of the Labour History Museum would not goaway. The trustees of National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside were castin the role of outsiders destroying Liverpool’s heritage. Liverpool council’sLibraries and Arts Committee expressed concern about the planned closure. Amotion criticising the trustees was heard in full council and local Labour MPstabled an early day motion in the House of Commons on 7 November. TheTransport and General Workers Union and the Merseyside UnemployedResources Centre suggested that the museums’ board should have a ‘North-Westtrustee with more direct experience of working class life and attitudes.’80

The commotion threatened the delicate balance that Foster had to maintainbetween the national status of his museums and their role as Liverpool’smuseums. He promised that the new museum would not lose its emphasis onworking class and trade union history, and set up an advisory group to discuss itscontents. It was chaired by Curator of Regional History, Loraine Knowles, anddrew representatives from Merseyside Trade Union Community & UnemployedResource Centre; the North West Labour History Society; Liverpool TradesCouncil; Second Chance To Learn; Liverpool Polytechnic; the King’s Regiment;and the University of Liverpool’s departments of history, sociology, economichistory and continuing education. The closure of the Museum of Labour Historywent ahead and the Lord Mayor of Liverpool opened phase one of the new

80 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1991, pp. 283-285, ‘Liverpool Life (86/91)’ Board of Trustees 26 November 1991, p.283,para.12.


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Museum of Liverpool Life on 1 May 1993. 750 square metres of displays in theformer Boat Hall were divided into Making a Living, Demanding a Voice andMersey Culture.

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Chapter 11 – 1990-1997 - More experiments and expansion

For decades museum authorities were untroubled by the human remains in theircollections, though many held a quantity of Egyptian mummies, artefacts madewith human bone and hair, and material formerly used for medical study. Themuseum’s collections contained over a thousand such items81. In 1989 the WorldArchaeological Congress signalled a change in attitudes in their VermillionAccord on Human Remains. It demanded more respect for human remains, andfor the views that different groups held about their dead. The Accord was dulyreported to the trustees of National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside inSeptember 1990. A further report in June 1991 listed human remains in thecollections and proposed guidelines for the ‘Storage, Display, Interpretation andReturn of Human Remains in Ethnographical Collections’82. The matter cameinto sharp focus in 1993 when the grotesque tale of a human head came to light.

A post-graduate student from the University of Southampton, Cressida Fforde,visited the museum on her search for the remains of Yagan a Noongar warriorfrom Western Australia who is considered a hero for his resistance to whitesettlers and was shot dead by a settler in 1833. Fforde identified a human head ofAustralian Aboriginal origin in the museum’s ethnology collections as that ofYagan. The head had entered the museum’s collection in 1894 from theLiverpool Royal Institution, which acquired it in 1835 by gift from a Royal NavyLieutenant Dale. It had been formally removed from the museum’s collection in1964 because it had deteriorated badly, and it was buried in Everton Cemeteryalong with some other human remains from the collections.

When Yagan’s head was buried, responsibility for it had passed to Liverpool CityCouncil, the managers of the cemetery. As a result of Fforde’s research, theAustralian government asked for its return and the City Council asked the HomeOffice for a licence to exhume the head of Yagan from Everton Cemetery. TheHome Office refused the request. In May 1997 Ken Colbung, representing theNoongah elders in Western Australia, visited the UK to try to reopen the case.

81 Surveys have shown that National Museums Liverpool collections have about 1,240 itemsidentified as human remains. These include twenty complete Ancient Egyptian mummies; skulls,bone fragments and other skeletal material; 864 slides of human tissue, and nearly 100 artefactswhich incorporate human remains such as bone and teeth.

82 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1991, pp.171-178, ‘Human Remains (51/91)’ Board of Trustees 18 June 1991, appendix 14.


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He visited Liverpool and museum director Richard Foster was persuaded tointervene.

It turned out that another burial had been made on top of Yagan’s. A plan wasmade to sink a shaft next to the coffins and remove the casket with the remainssideways, without disturbing burials above. Richard Foster put up about £1,300 tobring in geophysical experts from University College London to do a survey on 11June 1997. He sent their report to the Home Office, a licence was granted, andthe exhumation went ahead on 14 August. At a handover ceremony at LiverpoolTown Hall on Sunday 31 August, the City Council handed Yagan’s head in aninscribed wooden box to a representative of the Australian High Commission.The High Commission passed the head to Aboriginal elders for return to WesternAustralia.

Ironically the legislation under which national museums were set up would nothave allowed the return of Yagan’s head if it had still been in the museums’collection when the return was requested83. It was only the fact that the head hadalready been de-accessioned because it was deteriorating that allowed the returnto go ahead. This anomaly was only removed by the Human Tissues Act 2004which was primarily designed to regulate the removal and holding of humantissue within the National Health Service following the scandal at Alder HeyHospital in West Derby, Liverpool. Section 47 of the act gave national museumsthe power to remove human remains from their collections, and led to the returnof human remains to New Zealand and Australia84.

83 Article 6 of the Merseyside Museums and Galleries Order 1986 allows de-accessioning only inthe following circumstances:• A duplicate object or work.• An object that in the Trustees’ opinion is unsuitable for retention in the collections and can be

disposed of without detriment to the interests of students or members of the public.• An exchange with another institution as scheduled in the Museums and Galleries Act 1992.• An object or work that has become useless by reason of damage, physical deterioration or

infestation.

84 The Human Tissues Act became law in November 2004, but the specific section referring tomuseum de-accessioning had to wait until 2006 for a ‘Commencement Order’. The trustees thenagreed that to the de-accessioning of three tattooed heads toi moko, the skeletal remains ofanother toi moko and a cranium identified as Moriori from the Chatham Islands, and they werehanded over in November 2007. The Australian government submitted a request for the return ofthree items in January 2006, and they were agreed by trustees on 11 September 2007. Tworepresentatives of the Ngarrindjeri, a group of clans from South Australia, visited the museum on13 May 2009 and collected the first of them.


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In the eighties and early nineties the museum enjoyed a period of popularity withannual numbers of visits reported as around 500,000 each year.

In 1991 the trustees set a target of two million annual visits to its museums by1999, and they opened all their museums and the art galleries for an extra twohours on Sundays - 12 noon to 5pm, instead of 2pm to 5pm. Though the increasefrom 1.3 million in 1991 to 2 million in 1999 proved impossible to achieve, thetarget reflected a feeling of confidence in the nationalised museums’ service, andcreated an atmosphere in which staff were encouraged to experiment.

The success of the hands-on Natural History Centre in the museum led to anexperimental Discovery Centre where the techniques that had worked for naturalhistory were tried out on human cultures. Archaeology and ethnology staff setup the experimental centre for a brief period in the summer of 199185.

The most ambitious experiment was the mysteriously named JASON Project. Itwas the brainchild of Bob Ballard, Director of the Woods Hole OceanographicInstitute, USA, and the discoverer of the wrecks of the rms Titanic and thebattleship Bismarck. In 1993 his JASON Project investigated the Sea of Cortez,between the Baja California peninsula and the coast of Mexico. On six days ineach of two consecutive weeks from 1 March, several hour-long shows werebroadcast to sites in the USA and to the museum in Liverpool. During each showthe audiences asked questions that were answered live by the scientists at theinvestigation site. During the last few minutes of some of the shows an audiencemember operated a remote control to guide a submersible in the ocean at theinvestigation site. It worked in spite of storms in the Eastern United States, andwon £600,000 of support from Barclays Life for a three year programme inLiverpool.

The second year of the Jason Project came from Belize, with live broadcasts at theMerseyside Maritime Museum between 28 February and 12 March 1994 that wereseen by 4,937 people, a downturn on the 1993 total of 6,220. The third Jason year,1995, also at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, came from Hawaii between 27February and 11 March, and studied active volcanoes on the Big Island, andvolcanoes on Io, one of Jupiter’s Moons, using the NASA Infra-Red TelescopeFacility on Mount Kea. The museum ran family days and a half-day coursearranged with the University of Liverpool.

85 After its brief outing in 1991, the experimental hands-on human cultures centre lay dormant formore than ten years until it was revived in the museum’s Weston Discovery Centre opened in2005.


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The fourth and, as it turned out final time JASON ran in Liverpool was in April1996 and came from Florida. It set out to study aquatic systems in the Evergladesand areas bordering the Florida Keys. It was the third year of Barclay Life’ssponsorship, and the company declared that it had a policy of not supportingprojects beyond three years. As no other sponsor could be found, Liverpool’sinvolvement in the JASON project terminated.

Since the appointment of Patrick Sudbury as Keeper of Astronomy in 1969 themuseum had covered physical as well as life sciences and earth sciences. On 9September 1993 Space and Time galleries were opened next to the Planetariumon the top floor. The galleries cost was £375,000, and Dr. Mike Bode, who wasAssistant Provost and Head of the Astrophysics Group at the Liverpool JohnMoores University, persuaded Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor ofMathematics at Cambridge University, to open the gallery via a telephone link.

Dr. Bode also persuaded the museum to enter an ambitious partnership with JohnMoores University and Royal Greenwich Observatory to site a large robotictelescope on the Canary Islands and control it remotely from Liverpool. Hemanaged to set up the telescope at a cost of £2.5 million. The intention was thatthe museum would use imagery and information from the telescope for thepublic in the Space Gallery and Planetarium. However the public opening timesof the museum were during the day and the telescope operated only at night.The partnership produced the remotely operated telescope but it did not producemuch for the museum or its public.

At this time the museums charged for participation in the JASON Project, forentry to exhibitions, and for admission to the Merseyside Maritime Museum onAlbert Dock. Charges for entry to the Merseyside Maritime Museum rose from60p adults and 30p for concessions in 1980 to £1.50 and 75p in 1989. A passportticket introduced in 1989 allowed visitors to return to the museum withoutfurther charge within one year. In November 1991 a local resident ticket waslaunched allowing unlimited access for one adult and two children for one year.

Advice on charging from Parliament was not very helpful. Richard Fosterreported that a House of Commons committee report of January 1990, ShouldMuseums Charge?: Some Case Studies appeared to offer…

…broad support for maintaining the status quo so far as charging foradmission to NMGM institutions is concerned, i.e. free admission shouldbe maintained where it has been traditionally so, but new attractions


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should normally be introduced on the basis of a reasonable compulsorycharge86.

In this mixed system admission to the museum and Walker Art Gallery onWilliam Brown Street remained free, though visitors were charged for entry tosome exhibitions. Museum staff struggled to make the exhibition chargesoperate effectively. Queen Noor al-Hussein of Jordan opened the exhibitionJordan, Treasures from an Ancient Land at the museum in 1991, but its entrancecharge meant that only one in ten of museum visitors went to the exhibition.The compulsory charge was abandoned in favour of a ‘trust the visitor payment’.

A Monsters of the Deep exhibition was shown at the museum for nearly tenmonths from March 1994. Entry to the exhibition cost £1 for an adult ticket and50p for a concessionary ticket, with group rates of £2 for four or more people.After eleven weeks, admission income totalled only £14,801.

The Dinosaurs Alive charging exhibition ran for 28 weeks between February andSeptember 1995, and was reckoned to be easily the museum’s most popularexhibition with over 85,000 visitors. Nevertheless a survey showed that 25%considered the exhibition poor, or of poor value for money. Admission priceswere £3.25 for adults, £2 for concessions and £10 for family groups.

The trustees discussed rolling out entrance charges to all of their museums. Amajor incentive was an oddity in tax legislation which meant that, if they chargedentry, the museum would be seen as a business and could reclaim all ValueAdded Tax. At the Maritime Museum they paid about £30,000 VAT on theadmission fees but reclaimed about £175,000 of VAT on the goods and servicessupplied to the site. The estimate of income from VAT that could be recovered ifa charge was made at all venues was £500,000. Richard Foster resisted chargingfor entry to museums. He argued that they had been free for many decades, buthe noted that ‘there may be differences of opinion between Trustees on thisissue.’87

86 1990. National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1990, p. 33, ‘Museums Admission Charges – Select Committee Report (D/5/90)’ reportto the Board of Trustees 6 February 1990 p.38, para.19. [Report on the House of CommonsEducation, Science and Arts Committee, 1990. Should Museums Charge?: Some Case Studies. 10January.]87 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1993. pp.3-18, ‘Corporate Plan – Stage 5 Report (2/93) Finance Committee 19 January1993, p.8.


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The mid-nineties saw a succession of new displays and three new publicmuseums – the Museum of Liverpool Life, the Customs and Excise NationalMuseum and the Conservation Centre.

The Museum of Liverpool Life opened on I May 1993 and the Customs and ExciseNational Museum opened in the Merseyside Maritime Museum building in 1995.Among new displays opened up in the Merseyside Maritime Museum was theTransatlantic Slavery Gallery opened on 24 October 1994 by Maya Angelou. Thetrustees also considered buying the Beatles Story, an attraction at the oppositeend of Albert Dock from the Maritime Museum. They commissioned a reportfrom the business advisers Pannell Kerr Forster but did not go ahead with thepurchase. Foster introduced new tickets for admission to all the dockside venues -the Merseyside Maritime Museum complex, the Piermaster’s House andLiverpool Life. He continued the local residents’ passes providing unlimitedvisits for a year.

On 16 October 1996, Loyd Grossman, television presenter, chef and museumenthusiast, led a launch day for the new Conservation Centre. It opened to thepublic on the following day, and the Prince of Wales gave it a royal launch on 6December. The centre was located in the former Midland Railway GoodsReceiving Warehouse in central Liverpool and housed a set of well-equippedconservation workshops and a public gallery explaining the museum’s work ofconservation.

Work on the Conservation Centre project had been long and arduous but had notdeflected Foster from planning his biggest scheme, the renovation of themuseum. From the summer of 1994 Richard Foster earmarked the museum asthe next development when the Conservation Centre was open.

Ambitions for the museum were spurred on by the arrival of the National Lotteryin November 1994. It presented the best opportunity for capital investment inmuseums for a hundred years or more. Foster wanted to take over the areas ofthe building originally built for the Central Technical School, and then occupiedby Liverpool Polytechnic and by John Moores University, as the Polytechnicbecame in 1992. He saw that the addition of their areas to the museum offered thechance to realise an ambitious vision for the museum. He planned anencyclopaedic museum in four parts:-

• The Museum of Matter was to deal with space and geological processes.


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• The Museum of Life would cover natural history from the earliest times tothe present.

• The Museum of Society would explore the culture and growth of societies.• The Museum of Art was to explore the aesthetics of the living world and

human artefacts.

The trustees appointed the consultants Touche Ross to produce a developmentplan for the museum, in association with Lord Cultural Resources, MichaelWilford and Partners and H. Philip Rockhill and Associates. The report includedthe first proposals to abandon the historic entrances to the 1860 and the 1900sbuildings, and to build a new entrance to the museum. They suggested using thelightwell in the 1900s building to link the two buildings together with a newentrance with no steps, leading to a central space, which they called ‘a lofty front-to-back entrance foyer’88.

The consultants also opened up discussions about the museum’s name andsuggestions included Liverpool International Museum, Museums of Matter, ofLife, of Society and of Art and Discovery!

While he planned a big scheme to extend the museum Foster saw that existingareas were gloomy and forbidding, with poor access and facilities. He usedEuropean Regional Development Funding to make interim improvements,providing a brighter entrance area, better and more accessible toilets, two baby-change rooms, a cloakroom and a chair lift to give wheelchair access to theAquarium in the basement. Most of these innovations were subsequently sweptaway by the major scheme, but visitors still use the male and female toilets thatwere installed in 1995 near to the Planetarium on what is now floor five of themuseum.

Discussions with representatives of Liverpool John Moores University abouttaking over the floors beneath the museum’s Horseshoe galleries, raised hopethat they might hand it over soon, and the value of the University’s part of thebuilding was set at about £1 million. The extra space released by their departurewould allow a big development scheme. In Foster’s plan, it opened the way notonly a new larger integrated museum, but for an ambitious revival of the

88 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1995 (NML bound vol.), pp.81-88, ‘Liverpool Museum – development options (13/95)’Building and Design Committee January 1995 – the report asks for comments on key questionsbeing identified by Touche Ross, Michael Wilford and Partners, and Lord Cultural Resources,working on the ‘Liverpool Museum Master Plan’ – p.85, para.A2.7.


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cultural heart of Liverpool. He suggested that his plans for the museum and theart gallery would lift the fortunes of nearby historic cultural buildings - St.George’s Hall, the Central Library and three of the city’s main theatres, theLiverpool Empire, the Royal Court and the Playhouse – not to mention theConservation Centre in the restored Midland Railway Goods ReceivingWarehouse.

The plans became an Integrated Development Plan 1997-2001 which includedworks at the Museum of Liverpool Life, the Walker Art Gallery and the museum,and some works on a new storeroom. National Museums and Galleries onMerseyside owned a warehouse in an industrial area near the docks to the northof Liverpool. It had a floor area of 7,700 square metres on two levels, of whichonly the ground floor of 4,700 square metres could be used because the roof wasso bad. The new store could take the antiquities, ethnology and decorative artscollections clearing space in the museum. The plan left the natural sciencecollections in the museum.

The museums’ trustees gave Foster’s development plan the highest priorityrating, but John Moores University put back the date of their move from the oldCentral Technical School. They became an apparently immovable obstruction inthe path of the scheme.

A further complication arose when a steering group of museum staff questionedthe master plan in the draft report by the Touche Ross consultancy team. TheTouche Ross recommendations were that the museum needed a very ambitiousremodelling to create a new front-to-back entranceway by roofing over an opencourtyard in the middle of building. They also suggested new attractionsincluding an Omnimax and an enlargement of the Aquarium into an OceansExperience. Museum staff wanted to retain more space for storage of collectionsrather than send the stored collections of antiquities, ethnology and decorativearts to the storeroom in Bootle. Touche Ross refused to bow to this new lessambitious direction. A firm of Liverpool architects Ormrod & Partners wereapproached to do a technical feasibility study on the less disruptive plansuggested by the staff steering group.

Meanwhile at the Walker Art Gallery the staff steering group planned to upgradethe displays of paintings and the gallery’s foyer, and to create a new prints anddrawings room. At the Museum of Liverpool Life they planned new displays –Homes and Communities and a new King’s Regiment Gallery.


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The proposals for the museum became a contentious issue. How manycollections would be transferred to the refurbished warehouse to the north ofLiverpool? How radical would the internal refurbishment of the museumbuildings be? Would new displays or storerooms be created in the parts of thebuilding to be bought from John Moores University?

Richard Foster stuck to his decision that he would submit a single HeritageLottery Fund bid for capital works at the Walker and Liverpool Life alongside abigger project for the museum redevelopment. He said that the new lessambitious scheme for the museum led by the staff steering group showed flaws.It lacked an overall vision for the new museum, and failed to show that it wouldproduce a satisfactory increase in the number of visits. In December 1995 hesignalled his intention to take stronger control of planning the works at themuseum and seconded his principal assistant, Amy de Joia, to a new post ofproject officer for a two-year period. He set her the task of preparing an outlinebid to the National Heritage Lottery Fund for an overall scheme estimated at £40million, and he appointed a development officer on a five-month secondment tohelp her establish a fund-raising strategy for the scheme.

In order to prepare bids for funding, de Joia had to redefine the contentiousbuilding project at the museum. Foster insisted that level access to the museummust replace the 39 steps to the existing entrance, and that a new centralcirculation area must replace the small and cramped entrance set to one side ofthe building. In other words the plans would revert to most of what the ToucheRoss report had suggested.

The plan showed that visit numbers would rise from 500,000 visits to at least700,000 per year, and the new museum’s theme would be ‘discovery – from theoceans to the stars’.

In the expansive early years of National Museums and Galleries on MerseysideFoster looked to increase the number of museums in his portfolio. He had nowidentified a reduced number of sites as the top priority for development. TheBoard of Trustees set as their highest priority for 1997 the redevelopment of themuseum, and the intended purchase of the areas of the building owned byLiverpool John Moores University. He also set ambitious aspirations for newattractions in the museum, with a strong emphasis on new technologies. AWorld Info Theatre would be based on the JASON experiment linking themuseum to scientific expeditions around the world. A Space Theatre was toreplace the Planetarium with something closer to an Omnimax cinema and


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linked to the robotic telescope on the Canary Isles. A Walk Through Historywould provide an ‘experience’ of the history of the natural and human worlds.Oceans Experience built on the aquarium with ‘walk-through’ tanks, touch tanks,and live television links. A Virtual Reality Museum would present 3D scans ofthe collections. World View from a City was a theatre project to presentLiverpool’s history in the museum and in other buildings in the area including St.George’s Hall.

As the campaign began to gather pace, the approved message for importantvisitors emphasised these forward-looking display concepts and the long historyof the museum. Foster’s revitalised museum was planned for the 150th

anniversary in 2001 of Lord Derby’s founding bequest, and would finally finishthe job of repairing the damage inflicted by the bombing of 1941. In 1996Secretary of State for National Heritage Virginia Bottomley visited, and the chairof the trustees of the National Heritage Lottery Fund Lord Rothschild visited atthe invitation of the Friends of National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside.Rothschild gave a talk at the annual Roscoe Dinner, held at the ConservationCentre, and he toured the Walker Art Gallery, Conservation Centre and themuseum where he officially opened an exhibition on Foster’s IntegratedDevelopment Plan, A Vision for the Future.

The trustees adopted Foster’s plan. They gave it the name NMGM 2001 andappointed business consultants E.C. Harris of Liverpool to manage the project. InSeptember 1996 they approved a package of proposed works at the Walker ArtGallery, the Museum of Liverpool Life, the Bootle store and, mainly, at themuseum, at an estimated cost of £42 million. An initial application was to go tothe National Heritage Lottery Fund and advertisements were to go out forarchitects.

Negotiations began again with John Moores University offering £700,000 for thespaces below the Horseshoe galleries. They were key to the construction of thenew flat-access front-to-back entrance plan which was so integral to the plan. Thetarget set for the purchase was September 1998.

Over the next few months estimated costs of the various elements in the planwent up and down. Bits went out of the plan and came back in as costings andideas evolved. The works on the store were removed from the main projectbecause they diluted the impact of works at the museum, the Walker Art Galleryand the Museum of Liverpool Life. The project team also investigated the option


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of going into partnership with commercial organisations to finance and runOceans Experience and the large format cinema.

In November 1996, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, VirginiaBottomley, announced the grant for the next three years for national museums,including National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. Based on her figuresthe trustees calculated that their grant would effectively reduce in value by £6million between 1993 and 2000. They would have to introduce across-the-boardadmission charges during the financial year of April 1997 to March 1998. Theywere reluctant to introduce charges for venues that had always been free,including the museum, the Walker Art Gallery and the Lady Lever Art Gallery,but they felt that they had no option. By this time many of the other nationalmuseums had introduced charges ranging from £3 for adults at the NationalMuseum of Wales, Cardiff, up to £5.50 at the National Maritime Museum and theNatural History Museum in London. The proposal for Liverpool was an adultcharge of £3, but the ticket would favour local residents because it would offerunlimited visits to all of National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside venuesfor a year.

At a special meeting in January 1997, the trustees deferred the introduction ofadmission charges until after the forthcoming general election, in case the newgovernment brought changes in funding policy. They also reaffirmed theirdetermination to continue with their ambitious capital plans to revive themuseum by 2001, in time for the 150th anniversary of Lord Derby’s foundingbequest.

The ‘outline’ application went off to the Heritage Lottery Fund on 31 January1997. It asked for a grant of £28.4million - 75% of a total project cost of £37.9million.

In February the building design team was appointed with Law & Dunbar-Nasmith, Edinburgh as architect, and Gardiner & Theobald ManagementServices, Manchester, as project manager. The quantity surveyors were RexProcter & Partners, Bradford; the structural engineers were Curtins ConsultingEngineers, Liverpool; and the building services engineers were David McAspurn& Partnership, Liverpool.

Two Heritage Lottery Fund assessors visited in April - Celina Fox, a member oftheir expert panel and Janet Carter, the case officer for the Liverpool project.They suggested a separate ‘fast-track’ application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for


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up to £1 million to pay for the work in the store in north Liverpool to rehousearchaeology and ethnology collections. A ‘fast track’ application went off in July1997.

The main application, in four volumes, went off to the Heritage Lottery Fund on17 December 1997. As it turned out the ‘fast-track’ application was not consideredseparately. The Heritage Lottery Fund assessed the two applications together andtheir trustees’ decision was not expected until July 1998.

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Chapter 12 – 1997-2001 – Highs and Lows

In the general election held on 1 May 1997, the Labour Party displaced theConservatives in a landslide victory. Richard Foster and the chairman of thetrustees David McDonnell went to see the new Secretary of State for Culture,Media and Sport, Chris Smith. He asked them to postpone the introduction ofadmission charges promising a review of funding in the autumn. The trusteesagreed to postpone charges for school visits but felt that they had to go aheadwith general admission charges.

And so, on 7 July 1997, admission charges were introduced across NationalMuseums and Galleries on Merseyside. For the first time in 144 years there was acharge at the door of the museum - £3 for an adult.

The introduction of admission charges did not fit well with what the Secretary ofState for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith wanted. In December1997 heissued a consultation paper on access to national museums and galleries, and freeadmission. He wrote to David McDonnell, chairman of the trustees of NationalMuseums and Galleries on Merseyside – ‘My first decision on taking up office lastMay was to launch a review of access to the national museums and galleries... Wemade it clear that we would like to see institutions doing all they can to balancethe books while maximising access. That remains the key to our approach to thisissue – the broadest possible access’89.

Chris Smith conceded that the scheme that allowed access to the museum for ayear with one ticket was ‘interesting’, but essentially there was a stand-off betweenthe Secretary of State and the Trustees, and the entrance charges remained inforce.

Negotiations with John Moores University over the acquisition of their part of thebuilding languished for some time but revived when the Vice-ChancellorProfessor Peter Toyne wrote to Richard Foster. He said that the university couldno longer meet the date of September 1998 to quit the building, but they wouldagree to go in December. The contract for the sale was about to be signed whenthe Heritage Lottery Fund decided that they needed a District Valuer’s report tovalidate the price. The exchange of contracts was delayed but eventually themuch-longed-for hand-over of the building was finally achieved on Tuesday 26

89 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1998. pp.264-278 ‘Review of Access to National Museums and Galleries (21/98)’ Boardof Trustees 17 February 1998, pp. 270-271.


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January 1999. National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside finally had controlof the whole building and could go ahead with the ambitious plan to put in a newcentral atrium joining the two halves of the building together.

However by the middle of 1998 doubts began to emerge that the NMGM 2001project would indeed be completed by 2001, the 150th anniversary of the Earl ofDerby’s founding bequest. The zoology curator Clem Fisher was planning anexhibition illustrating her research on Lord Derby and his extraordinarymenagerie and natural history collection at Knowsley Hall. Maybe thisexhibition could go into the Upper Horseshoe gallery for summer 2001 andwould be a fitting celebration of the 150th anniversary while the major capitalproject was completed later.

The other worry of 1998 was that the first months of charging admission failed toproduce the expected income. From July 1997 to March 1998 the total incomegenerated from admissions was £391,037, 79% of the target figure of £495,083.Richard Foster and the trustees feared that if this shortfall was repeated over thecoming years the deficit in their revenue budget would increase each year byhundreds of thousands of pounds. Not only would their main sponsor, theDepartment of Culture, Media and Sport, forbid this, but it would also throw outthe budget predictions that they had submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund togain a grant.

The trustees had to take up a clear position on charging admission and on ChrisSmith’s demands for better access to museums. They said that they offered areasonable service on the budget they got. They opened eight public museumsand galleries for 360 days a year, and a £3 ticket gave unlimited entry to all eightvenues for 12 months. £1.50 bought concession ticket for a year, and £7.50 familyticket. But experience showed that this did not bring in enough money and so, inorder to balance their budget, they needed to introduce charges for school visitsfrom September 1998.

On 24 July 1998 Chris Smith detailed the biggest ever increase in culturalfunding, including special help for national museums to remove admissioncharges. He promised £100 million for national museums and galleries, but hissupport would depend them achieving clear targets – free entry for children in1999; free entry for pensioners in 2000; and universal free entry in 2001.

Meetings were held with officials of the Department of Culture, Media and Sporton 8 September 1998, and with Chris Smith on 21 October.


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Richard Foster said that the £100 million spread over three years was not enoughto do the job, particularly as removing charges for entry would also remove themuseums’ exemption from paying VAT. Officials of the Department of Culture,Media and Sport told him that making national museums exempt from payingVAT was against European Union law. The situation remained unresolved andentrance charges remained in place for a further three years.

There was a double dose of good news in the summer of 1998. The ConservationCentre was named European Museum of the Year, and, on 22 July, the HeritageLottery Fund announced a grant of £24 million. The decision was taken at theHeritage Lottery Fund trustees’ meeting on 16 July. It was the largest award evermade to a museum, and the second largest award for any heritage scheme.

£24 million was 71% of a total scheme cost of £33.7 million. The only part of thescheme that the Heritage Lottery Fund trustees refused to fund was therefurbishment of the 17th century galleries at the Walker. Janet Carter, SeniorCase Officer for the Heritage Lottery Fund reported that her trustees thought thework on the two galleries was a lower priority because there was already fullpublic access to the rooms and the works of art, and because other funders mightbe interested in supporting the project. And so it turned out. The galleries wererefurbished with a £500,000 grant from the Wolfson Foundation.

The Heritage Lottery Fund project was given the science-fiction name Into theFuture. Richard Foster set up thirteen ‘stage teams’ of staff to oversee each partof the project, and appointed London-based designers Jasper Jacobs Associates towork on the new displays and public areas, along with their Canadian sub-consultants Reich + Petch to work on graphic design. The newly revitalisedmuseum would open to the public in August or September 2001.

Fund-raising for Into the Future gathered pace when Phil Redmond, Chairman ofMersey Television, and 21 members of the cast of Brookside and Hollyoakslaunched a public appeal on 6 April 1999. Phil Redmond also hosted a charityball with a Greek and Roman theme in aid of the appeal in July. The LittlewoodsOrganisation agreed to a £250,000 sponsorship, and the Friends of NationalMuseums and Galleries on Merseyside donated £100,000 towards the new atriumfor the museum. In November Cherie Blair hosted a reception at 10 DowningStreet, which was followed by a buffet supper at Spencer House, hosted by LordRothschild, the chair of the trustees of the Heritage Lottery Fund. Liverpoolsolicitor and philanthropist Rex Makin offered £150,000 in support of Into theFuture.


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In June 1999 there was a change in strategy for the building works. Instead ofkeeping science staff and collections on the Horseshoe galleries, while their newstorerooms and offices were created below them, the decision was made to clearthis part of the building to allow the building work to go ahead. The UpperHorseshoe gallery had been closed to the public since the Second World War, andthe upgrading of the museum’s buildings would open both Horseshoe galleriesto the public.

The museum had already hired a couple of industrial units in the MaritimeEnterprise Park in Bootle for regional history collections, sculptures from thearchaeology and ethnology collections, and some assorted aquarium equipment.Three further units were acquired to provide 380 square metres of offices andover a thousand square metres of temporary storage space for the natural historyand physical sciences collections.

Income from admissions continued to be disappointingly below expectations, andFoster reported that the day-to-day finances of National Museums and Gallerieson Merseyside were ‘on a knife-edge’90. Nevertheless his senior staff had bids infor over fifty un-funded staff posts, and £500,000 worth of extra work caused bythe Into the Future capital scheme.

In September Richard Foster gave notice to the trustees of his plan to retire in2002, and he was appointed chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund Expert Panel forMuseums, Libraries and Archives, an important advisory role to the trustees ofthe Heritage Lottery Fund.

Foster was determined that the museum and Walker Art Gallery on WilliamBrown Street would not ‘go dark’ as he termed it. Though the building work wasextensive, they would both remain open throughout.

The public face of the museum motored on with comedian Ken Dodd openingthe exhibition Alice: The Wonderland of Lewis Carroll in July 1999. But gallerieswere starting to close because of the building works. The popular LandTransport gallery closed on 21 June 199991, and the Aquarium on 31 August 1999.

90 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 1999. pp.619-622 ‘1999-200 Budget Performance (75/98)’ Finance & Audit Committee 31August 1999, p.620, para.6.91 As the Land Transport gallery closed, the major exhibit, the 1838 Liverpool and Manchesterrailway locomotive Lion went on loan to Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and aftersome years return to Liverpool to be prepared for display in the Museum of Liverpool which is toopen in 2011.


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As galleries closed, the noise of the building work began to penetrate theremaining public areas, and smoke and dust from the building work set offalarms which meant that the building was evacuated. Visitors complained aboutan additional entry charge for the exhibition, Art of the Harley, and the chargewas removed within days of the exhibition’s opening.

The planned opening date for the revitalised museum was moved – and split intotwo phases. Phase one was to open in October 2001 and phase two in February2002.

As the capital works proceeded at the museum along with smaller schemes at theWalker and the Museum of Liverpool Life, balancing the books was becoming amajor headache. Financial security depended on a four-fold increase in predictedincome from £565,000 to £2.4 million in 2003-200492. Visit numbers were goingdown as capital works impacted at all three sites, and increases based on theimpact of new attractions were not realised because of delays to the Into theFuture project.

The chairman of the trustees met the Minister for the Arts, Alan Howarth, inLondon on 8 December 1999. Richard Foster was ill and could not attend. TheMinister demanded that National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside widenits audience to include disadvantaged groups in society, including ethnicminorities, people living on low incomes, and people with disabilities. AlanHowarth said that he regarded social inclusion as a priority for a nationalmuseum service in a provincial city.

Richard Foster was knighted in the New Year’s honours list of 2000, and theMinister demanded that he restructure the staff. Foster proposed to groupattractions in the museum under a new department of ‘Collections Access’, whichwould work alongside a new exhibitions department and the existing educationdivision. He also wrestled with reports of inadequate levels of gallery attendantstaff and found himself struggling with a tangle of working patterns and levels ofpay.

A total of about £1.7 million of extra spend had accumulated on the Into theFuture capital scheme. The extra came from changes to the scope of building

92 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2000 (NML bound vol.), pp.95-110 ‘Corporate Plan Stage 2: Issues and ForwardProgramme (8/00)’ Board of Trustees 18 January 2000, p.100, para17j.


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work, overspending on the Walker Art Gallery work, increases to consultant feesand increases to the cost of moving collections. It was clear that the process forauthorising extra works and costs was not strong enough and that the staff ‘StageTeams’ had not been getting information to the designers on time. In February2000 more staff were appointed to control the project and some of the proposedredisplay was cut. Nearly a thousand square metres of the Lower Horseshoewould be refurbished so that it could be opened to the public, but it would bereopened without a new display. Asbestos was discovered at both the museumand the Walker Art Gallery, and staff worried that the architects Law & Dunbar-Nasmith, based in Scotland, could not keep a close enough check on the buildingwork on site in Liverpool. Reports of items missing from the buildingcontractor’s site in the museum from March 2000 onwards culminated in a reportearly in May of the theft of an original Edwardian cast iron spiral staircase whichhad led to a small observatory on the museum roof.

On 1 May 2000 Amy de Joia, who had been appointed project officer in 1995, waspromoted to a new post of project director. Her Projects Division wasstrengthened and became a separate unit with new posts, having previously beena section in the Director’s Office.

The Into the Future project had become so complicated that the predictedoutcome cost varied almost week by week as different factors emerged. WhenAmy de Joia took up her new role, the anticipated overspend on the capitalscheme was beaten down to £1.3 million93, and savings of £1.9 million over threeor four years pulled the museums’ operational budget back into balance. After amonth or two, de Joia’s estimate of the predicted overspend on Into the Futurehad risen to £2 million94. On 6 October 2000 the Department of Culture Mediaand Sport offered £500,000 towards the cost of the treatment of asbestos at theWalker Art Gallery and the museum.

The first part of Into the Future, a new wing of the Museum of Liverpool Lifeopened to the public on 21 July 2000. On 23 August the newly expanded museumplayed host to the second year of activities for Slavery Remembrance Day.UNESCO nominated 23 August as International Day for the Remembrance of the

93 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2000. pp.361-363 ‘NMGM 2001 – Effect of Potential Overspend on General Fund(44/00)’ Board of Trustees 9 May 2000, p.361, para.2.

94 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2000. pp.441-443 ‘NMGM 01 projected overspend and the impact on NMGM’sFinancial Plan (53/00)’ Finance Committee 23 May 2000, p.442, para.2.


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Slave Trade and its Abolition and the anniversary was marked with a programmeof music and poetry. Then there was a more formal royal opening by PrinceCharles on 13 December 2000. The museum was soon attracting more than300,000 visits a year, and became a key attraction in Liverpool’s central docksarea. Within a few months of the opening Richard Foster started to propose thata new larger building was required for the Museum of Liverpool Life, and itshould be on a scale to match the ‘three graces’, the Royal Liver Building, theCunard Building and the Port of Liverpool building, the iconic group of buildingson Liverpool’s Pierhead95.

Into the Future work continued on William Brown Street, in the Walker ArtGallery and the museum. Here contractor’s work expanded into more and moreareas. Nevertheless the old entrance and a few galleries remained open to thepublic, except for brief periods in 2000. The fire alarms went off on 23 March andthe building was cleared. The system would not reset and the building wasclosed for five days, including the weekend of 25 and 26 March when events forNational Science week were planned. The breakdown of the fire alarm systemwas attributed to the contractor’s works, and meant that the building was closedagain for a single day on Wednesday 29 March.

The museum was closed again on weekdays between 12 July and 16 October 2000,to allow for ‘heavy drilling’ by the contractor. Schools half term followed soonafter the closure - 23-27 October - and the contractor was still drilling in severalareas during that week.

In November 2000 the trustees of the Clore Foundation offered £250,000 towardsthe fit out of the new Natural History Centre in the museum.

The giant Blue Streak rocket from the museums’ collections went off to the newNational Space Centre in Leicester, to form the centrepiece of a new glass tower.On 14 December 2000, while work was carried out in the tower, a chain hoistcame loose and swung into the rocket. Engineer conservators from the ImperialWar Museum, Duxford repaired the damage.

The costs of the capital works and their impact of the works on the museum’soperation were a continual nagging worry. In February 2001 Richard Fosterproposed that the balance of the Collection Purchase Fund was spent on

95 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2001. pp.409-415 ‘Liverpool Vision – Fourth Grace (28/01)’ Board of Trustees 27February 2001.


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refurbishing the museum’s top floor café. It was, he said, an important earner ofincome. The trustees were split over the issue. A group of trustees wasconcerned that support for work on the collections was suffering. They hadrecently been annoyed because Foster stopped an annual contribution of £25,000to the museums’ Academic Publications Fund. They returned to the subjectwhen he suggested using the Collection Purchase Fund to refurbish the café.Foster felt that his attempts to solve budget problems were being blocked and heasked trustees ‘to take a consistent line where ‘special requests’ of this nature areconcerned’96. He argued that restoring a contribution to the AcademicPublications Fund would simply increase the budget deficit.

The Heritage Lottery Fund commissioned a report on the Into the Future schemefrom the construction managers Bovis Lend Lease. Its calculation of thepotential overspend on Into the Future was the highest yet, at nearly £6 million.Richard Foster saw a copy of the report in February 2001 and was encouraged toask for an additional grant of £3.9 million, 65% of a projected overspend and anincrease of the Heritage Lottery Fund grant for the project from £24 million to£27.9 million. The Heritage Lottery Fund trustees approved the additional moneyon 27 February 2001. They put conditions on their extra grant, including ademand that National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside cut its operatingbudgets to find an additional £1.3 million towards the increased project costs.

On Thursday 8 March 2001 Richard Foster died at Swanage in Dorset.

The news of his death spread quickly and numerous people in many walks of lifewere devastated when they heard the news. There was shock, surprise, and evenpanic among his colleagues in National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside.About 200 people attended his funeral service at Liverpool Parish Church onFriday 16 March.

The inquest into his death on Thursday 19 April found that Richard Foster hadtaken his own life. He had been in London and, instead of returning home, hehad hired a car and driven to Swanage. A whisky bottle was found on stepsoverlooking the deserted beach. He had apparently filled his pockets with sandand drowned in the sea. Tributes to his work and character came from every side.They said that he set himself impossibly high standards and that he felt that hedid not exert enough control in his work.

96 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2001. pp.339-359 ‘Corporate Plan 2001 and Funding Agreement 2001-04 (27/01)’ Boardof Trustees 27 February 2001, p.364, para.22.


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A memorial service was held at the Anglican Cathedral, Liverpool, on 6 June2001, and all National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside venues were closedduring the afternoon. A memorial appeal set up after he died, received manyhundreds of donations and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for hemuseums.

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Chapter 13 – 2001-2008 – Capital of Culture

As an interim measure when Richard Foster died, the trustees set up a ‘directorategroup’ of nine senior staff. The directorate had an inner ‘kitchen cabinet’ of three- the Keeper of the Maritime Museum, the Head of Central Services Division andthe Secretary to the Trustees. The Head of Central Services, Tony Archard, actedas ‘accounting officer’, a role required by the Department of Culture, Media andSport. He had a veto over the rest of the group if required, though afterwardsthey all agreed that the veto had not been needed.

The appointment of a new director took some months. David Fleming, directorof Tyne and Wear Museums, was appointed in June, and moved from Newcastlein October 2001. In the meantime, he visited Liverpool as ‘director-designate’.

The capital scheme at the museum became more complicated and slowed downover the summer of 2001. In September the architects wrote to the projectmanagers wearily complaining that ‘the project as a whole is suffering from anenormous amount of fatigue’97.

It proved impossible to find a contractor willing to take on the construction of anew aquarium. There was a suggestion that the museum’s specification wasdifficult to fulfil and needed to be revised. The architects began requesting extrafees and the builders claimed extra costs, but it proved difficult to agree aresolution of the requests and claims.

To add to the gloom, the museum was also attracting its lowest number of visitssince it reopened in 1966. The figures were counted over financial years, from 1April in one year to 31 March in the next year, and the worst year was 2000-2001with 180,297 visits. The next worst were the two years on either side of it. Even ahigh profile fashion exhibition Vivienne Westwood: the collection of RomillyMcAlpine between May and September failed to improve things. Numbers wereconstrained by the building work, and by the entrance charges, and probably by acurious policy of attempting to attract audiences from the Walker Art Galleryrather than addressing the museum’s traditional family audience.

97 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2001. pp.1153-1180 ‘NMGM 2001 – Progress Report (91/01)’ Building and DesignCommittee 18 September 2001, pp.1172-1174, letter of 4 September 2001, from Mark O Sidgwick,LDN Architects, to Jeff Day, Gardiner & Theobald Management Services, p.1172.


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The museum closed for five days in early October 2001 when contractors wereworking on security systems and the transfer of the security control room.

David Fleming, in his role as director designate attended a meeting of the interimdirectorate group on 18 July and they decided to drop admission charges. TheBoard of Trustees ratified the decision on 4 September. ‘Magic eye’ counters wereinstalled at all venues and entry was free from 1 December 2001.

Fleming looked to rationalise the names of the museum and of the wholeorganisation. The museum’s current name was Liverpool Museum which, hesaid, suggested a local history museum and was confused with the Museum ofLiverpool Life. The full title of National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside wascumbersome but necessary since it was given in the Parliamentary Order inCouncil which set the organisation up, but he suggested that the organisationcould operate or ‘trade’ under a shorter name. Within a couple of months thetrustees had reduced the options for the organisation to Liverpool NationalMuseums or National Museums Liverpool. After due consultation, they agreedto National Museums Liverpool, and this new name came into effect on 16 April2003.

The new name for the museum was not so easily or quickly resolved. There werebrainstorms, consultations, qualitative studies, and ever-changing lists of possiblenames...

National Museum of MerseysideMuseum of Science and Culture

Discovery MuseumWorld Museum

Museum of Science and World CulturesMetropolitan Museum Liverpool…

A vote by visitors, ‘opinion formers’, staff, and the Friends of National MuseumsLiverpool produced a small but definite lead for the name World MuseumLiverpool. However the mass of research and discussion led to a deferral of anydecision until early in 2004 when the trustees finally agreed to adopt this as thenew name, effective from Spring 2005 when the launch of the extended museumwas planned.

David Fleming set about creating a new management team, displacing some ofthe old team and creating two critical new posts. A new Director of PublicServices took charge of all the keepers in charge of venues who had previously


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reported directly to the director. This post was filled by Sharon Granville whohad previously worked for David Fleming in Tyne and Wear Museums. A newdirector of Development and Communications took charge of education,marketing, communication and exhibitions, and this post was filled by Amy deJoia.

The Into the Future capital project passed some milestones in 2002. The WalkerArt Gallery, closed since June 2001, reopened in February 2002 with the newexhibition galleries created as part of the Into the Future project. The firstexhibition there was George Romney, 1734–1802, and it was followed by The Artof Paul McCartney from May 2002.

The Romney exhibition opened with an entrance charge. Though entry to all thevenues was now free, the trustees had reserved the right to charge for entry toexhibitions. Half way through the exhibition Fleming removed the entrancecharge, and, unusually among national museums, National Museums Liverpoolhas made no further charges for exhibitions.

The museum project was beginning to seem endless, but at least some offices andstores were finished. In February 2002 staff displaced to Bootle by the buildingwork returned from their 28 months of exile, and the director and his officereturned to the museum in April from their temporary accommodation. Thenatural history collections moved back to their new stores between February andMay. Building work continued around them until completion was achieved on 20June 2002.

The project’s budgets were adjusted to account for estimated increases in ‘basebuild’ costs, and another bid to Heritage Lottery Fund went off on 24 July 2002.This was now the third bid for a grant for the Into the Future project. In July 1998the Heritage Lottery Fund had announced its original grant for the project of£23.8 million. In February 2001 they had agreed to increase the grant by £3.9million to £27.9 million. This final request was for a further £4.3 million, and wasagreed on 12 November 2002.

A mediator was called in to settle the difference of opinion with the buildingcontractors over the money they were due. The meeting took place over twodays, 25 and 26 November 2002, with the mediator, a QC who specialised inconstruction contracts.


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By this time little of the museum was left open. The Planetarium had itsmillionth visitor in early June. A series of exhibitions was designed to appeal tothe museum’s traditional family audience and began to lift it from its low pointin visit numbers. The Teddy Bear Story: 100 years of the Teddy Bear exhibitionopened in October 2002, and was followed by Grossology from July 2003. Thelatter, an upbeat interactive show about how the body works, attracted over 4,000visits on peak days.

On 15 May 2003, the Duke of Gloucester visited the museum. As soon as the royalparty stepped across the threshold the fire alarms went off. Nevertheless he wasguided around the new areas that had been created and was shown the plans forall that would go in them.

New staff were appointed to manage the fitting out of the building with displaysand public facilities. The project management company Fraser Randall wasappointed to work alongside them. They drew up a new programme forcompletion of the work at the Walker Art Gallery, a Craft and Design Gallery,and for the fit-out of the museum.

The first exhibit went into the refurbished museum in March 2004. A thirteenmetre high totem pole, or, more properly, a house frontal pole, from North WestCanada was installed at one end of the new atrium. Next in were two ancientEgyptian statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. They were taken fromdisplay in the museum’s old entrance and craned down the street to the newentrance. A photographer from the Liverpool Echo followed the operation, andphotographed a parking attendant as he threatened the crane driver with aparking fine. On 17 March the story appeared in the Echo under the headline‘Warden tries to book crane as it moves museum statue’. On the next day thestory was picked up by the Scotsman, Daily Mirror, Daily Express and severalregional papers. The Sun ran a picture story and the news went round the worldto the Sydney Morning Herald.

A third main exhibit for the new atrium, a huge pterosaur skeleton cast from anoriginal in the University of Texas at Austin, arrived from Canada where the casthad been made. It was suspended from an elaborate rig in the new atrium inNovember 2004.

The opening date for the extended museum was set as 29 April 2005. Bits of thebuilding work were revisited while fit-out works went on. There was extra work


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on a bridge outside the new main entrance and extensive work on the new mainstaircase in the atrium.

On 28 August 2004 the last bit of the Into the Future project at the Walker ArtGallery opened - the Craft and Design Gallery on the ground floor. It showsitems from the decorative art and costume collections, and like the museum’snew displays, was designed by Jasper Jacobs Associates.

Alongside the Into the Future project, David Fleming was involved innegotiations for a new museum about Liverpool to replace the Museum ofLiverpool Life. Liverpool City Council and the development agency LiverpoolVision proposed a Fourth Grace development overlooking the Mersey next toLiverpool’s iconic Pierhead, and were investigating the prospects of a museumelement in a public-private project. Fleming envisioned a new Museum ofLiverpool – ‘a world-class urban history museum housing, among other things,our famous land transport collections and a host of themes relating to the historyof Liverpool, including, due recognition of the city’s extraordinary contribution toBritish and World popular culture’98.

Fleming and his Director of Public Services, Sharon Granville, started meetingswith the chosen architect, Will Alsop, in January 2003. Their bargaining chip wasownership of part of the land where the development was to be sited, and theirambition was to create the world’s greatest city museum.

On 4 June 2003 Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport,announced that Liverpool was the UK’s nomination to be European Capital ofCulture 2008. Twelve UK cities submitted applications in March 2002. Liverpoolhad worked hard on the bid but was by no means the pre-announcementfavourite to win. In Newcastle/Gateshead officials felt so certain of a win thatthey booked an aeroplane with a congratulatory banner. The plane operator’soffer to fly to Liverpool instead was eagerly taken up. As Tessa Jowell visited thecity for the victory celebrations the plane flew overhead.

Three days later, on 7 June Liverpool was awarded World Heritage Site status.The designated site extended from Liverpool’s docks through its historiccommercial centre to the whole of William Brown Street, including the museum.

98 National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside Reports to the Board of Trustees andCommittees 2002. pp.363-368 ‘4th Grace – NMGM Policy (36/02)’ Board of Trustees 18 June 2002,p.364, para.2.


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The planned Fourth Grace was at the heart of the new World Heritage Site, andWill Alsop’s plans had the Museum of Liverpool opening within the Fourth Graceon 1 October 2008 – within the year that Liverpool would be European Capital ofCulture. But the space available for the museum had been reduced to 9,000square metres, and signs of fractures in the discussions began to appear. Then,suddenly, on 19 July 2004, the project partners - Liverpool Vision, North WestDevelopment Agency, Liverpool City Council and National Museums Liverpool –announced that the plans to build Liverpool's Fourth Grace were cancelled.

Initially the cancellation on the Fourth Grace dulled the Capital of Culture plans,but David Fleming continued with plans for a new free-standing Museum ofLiverpool on the museums’ own property. The North West Development Agencycame in with a grant of £2.5 million towards the project99 and, in January 2005, theDanish architects 3XNeilson were appointed.

Fleming also planned for a new museum on the theme of slavery, to replace theTransatlantic Slavery Gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The firstphase was to be a new display on the third floor of the Merseyside MaritimeMuseum. The next step was to be a new museum of slavery in the Dock TrafficOffice. Formerly occupied by Granada Television, the Dock Traffic Office is ahigh profile building on the corner of Albert Dock which could be linked to thethird floor of the Merseyside Maritime Museum by a bridge. National MuseumsLiverpool took a lease on the Dock Traffic office with an option to buy, andcommissioned Liverpool architects Austin-Smith:Lord to report on how thebuilding could be adapted and linked to the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

Meanwhile refurbishment of Sudley House began in April 2005 and the buildingwas closed to the public for building works including the removal of a step at theentrance and a lift to both public floors.

Work at the museum progressed and the erection of new illuminated pillars at itsnew entrance attracted attention. The existing entrance, up 39 steps, was bothdominant and well-known to thousands of visitors. Two huge new fin-shapedpillars were internally illuminated and were intended to clearly mark the newway in to the museum. An irate architect wrote to the Liverpool Daily Postdescribing them as ‘horrendous flashing disco lights’ and said that they would‘not go amiss at a Gala bingo hall’100.

99 Heal, Sharon, 2004. ‘Cloud lifted to make way for new museum’. Museums Journal, December,p.8.100 Serridge, Nick, 2005, ‘Blot on landscape’. Letter to Daily Post, 8 February.


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On 29 April 2005 the upgraded and extended museum finally opened its newdoors to the public. For days before the public opening there were special eventsfor press and media, volunteers and donors. Loyd Grossman, in his first publicengagement as chairman of the Board of Trustees, cut a ribbon across the newentrance as the museum opened at 10a.m. About a thousand people attendedincluding stilt walkers, role players, drummers, a ringmaster, a robot and a soloistBaha’i performer. A choir of more than 80 local schoolchildren performed ananthem written especially for the occasion.

The architects Law & Dunbar-Nasmith had roofed over the open courtyardbetween the old museum and the 1900s extension and converted it into a tall newatrium. With staircases and lifts to one side and bridged by high-level walkways,it was the core of the new museum, and gave direct access to all public areas.The atrium floor is covered, as museum geologists have noted, with ElterwaterSlate from Langdale, Cumbria, a metamorphosed volcanic ash about 400 millionyears old.

For a total cost of £35 million the museum offered 20,663 new exhibits in 5,405square metres of new public areas, with a further 4,440 square metres of storageand support services. Stores for natural history collections were built in themuseum. Scientific and human history material was stored off-site NationalMuseums Liverpool’s north Liverpool stores.

The public areas followed the theme set in the mid-nineties - ‘discovery – fromthe oceans to the stars’. It sounded poetic but was a practical variation on theencyclopaedic vision proposed by generations of the museum’s directors. Itultimately resolved itself into floors roughly divided into:-

Stars – Earth – Humans – Animals – Fish - Entrance

Liverpool’s Nerve magazine described the refurbished and extended museum.

The refurbished £35 million museum now promises a view of the world'from the oceans to the stars’.

Access has been much improved; the entrance is now at ground levelinstead of up dozens of steps. This leads into the stunning new glassatrium where the old museum connects to the extension in the formerJohn Moores University building, where most of the new galleries arelocated. The renovation has also seen the reopening of galleries that hadbeen closed since the museum was bombed in the Second World War. The


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old mish-mash of exhibits has been replaced by clearly defined newsections: 'Space and Time', 'Natural World', 'Human World', and 'Earth'.

Additions to the museum include a new bug house and aquarium withmarine and insect life better displayed than before while the WestonDiscovery and the Clore Natural History centres offer the chance to get'hands on' with exhibits from the human and natural world respectively -always good for getting kids interested. Exhibits are further brought to lifeby the Treasure House Theatre, which puts on live performances inrelation to the exhibits. Meanwhile the new World Cultures gallerycontains a selection of the antiquities brought to Liverpool by itsinternational traders. This does a good job of explaining not only thediffering cultures of the world but also how the city developed due to itsinternational connections.

Large parts of the museum - such as the ancient civilisation and rainforestsections - have hardly changed at all in twenty years; they are still mainlyobjects in glass cases with little cards. However, the museum hopes tocontinue re-development as more money becomes available.

This is a much more user-friendly Liverpool Museum, with thingsexplained in a way that's interesting, fun and easy to understand withoutbeing dumbed down.’101

In the first five months of opening the extended museum the number of visitsequalled the previous year’s total of 320,000. But, in September 2005, a fewmonths after opening, the two lifts in the new atrium broke down leaving onlythe stairs to take visitors between six floors. Staff pressed the museum’s goods liftinto use, guiding visitors to and from it through non-public areas. It soon becameevident that problems with the main public lifts were serious and they remainedout or commission for six months, until April 2006. Inevitably visitors becamedisillusioned and the increase in numbers slowed down. Nevertheless themuseum was packed for February half term in 2006 with 36,187 visits in sevendays.

Three tragic deaths rocked the museum and made a deep impact on those whowitnessed the incidents as well as the families and friends of those concerned. On15 May 2006 a young man, Alexander Dutton, fell from the top floor of the

101 Taylor, Kenn, 2005. ‘World Museum Liverpool’. Nerve, issue 6.http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/nerve6/world_museum.htm accessed 27.12.2009


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atrium staircase to his death. The inquest on 13 July revealed that he climbedover the glass balustrade and dropped from there. The coroner said there was noevidence that he intended to end his life and he may have been having a ‘mentalaberration’. Temporary screens were put up to prevent similar incidents but on26 November 2006 there was a further tragedy. Laura Bailey, aged 17, visited themuseum with her baby son Joseph, to meet the baby’s father Kevin Howard, aged20. She was on floor four when he stabbed her six times. She passed the baby to avisitor nearby and fell to the floor. Howard ran to the museum atrium, climbedover the glass balustrade onto a ledge and jumped to his death. Museum staffstruggled to staunch Laura Bailey’s bleeding, but she died where she was.

Huge banners were permanently installed over the front of the atrium staircaseto prevent further incidents, and the extended museum began to recover from itsinitial difficulties and tragedies. 524,465 visits were made to World Museum in2006, putting it well up into the top ten UK museums outside London. On 14February 2007 a member of staff in a replica Samurai costume welcomed themillionth visitor since the extended museum opened in April 2005.

On 4 June 2006 the Museum of Liverpool Life closed permanently, to be replacedin time by the larger, more ambitious purpose-built Museum of Liverpool. To fillin while the new museum was built, and while Liverpool was European Capital ofCulture in 2008, special exhibitions about the city were staged. For nearlyeighteen months The Beat Goes On told the story of Liverpool’s music from the1950s at the World Museum, and Magical History Tour ran for more than twoyears at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

World Museum had the busiest years of its long history in 2007 and 2008, with719,961 visits in 2007, and 787,767 in 2008, Liverpool’s year as European Capital ofCulture.

The museum took a long time to recover from the bomb that hit in May 1941. Itwas not until the opening of the extended museum in April 2005 that it recoveredfully. Long as the recovery from the wartime bomb was, other museums havetaken just as long. Leeds City Museum, bombed in March 1941, fully reopened ina newly converted building in September 2008. Berlin’s Neues Museum, bombedin November 1943 and February 1945, finally reopened in October 2009.

Over 150 years Liverpool’s museum built up massive collections and thendivested itself of significant parts of them. The Walker Art Gallery took over artwhen it opened in 1877. The Merseyside Maritime Museum took over maritime


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collections from 1980. The Liverpool story had its first separate museum in 1986at the Museum of Labour History, and then at the Museum of Liverpool Life. Itwill find its permanent home at the Museum of Liverpool, planned to open in2011.

Having settled these collections in their new homes, Liverpool’s museum hasreturned to the themes of its early years and the interests of its two greatestbenefactors - the 13th Earl of Derby and Joseph Mayer. Its focus has turned awayfrom Liverpool and onto the things that had arrived in the city from elsewhere -natural history and human cultures from around the world.

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When the museum first opened in 1854 there were already two other museum’s in Liverpool,both in Colquitt Street - the Royal Institution Museum (above), and James Mayer’sEgyptian Museum (below right).

In 1867 Liverpool jeweller and antiquarian Joseph Mayer (1803-1886) closed his EgyptianMuseum and gave his huge collection of art and antiquities to the museum in 1867.


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13th Earl of Derby (1775-1851).The bequest of his natural history collectionat his death in 1851 led to the founding ofthe museum.

14th Earl of Derby (1799-1869).Prime Minister three times, he wishedLiverpool town council to clear his house of hisfather’s collection so that he could return toLondon.

The original museum building of 1852 on the corner of Slater Street and Parr Street,Liverpool.


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James Allanson Picton (1805-1889).A member of Liverpool council, hechampioned the museum.

William Brown (1784-1864)A banker in Liverpool for more than fortyyears, he spent £40,000 on the new museumand library building.

Late in the 1850s, William Brown built Richmond House on Chapel Street, Liverpool, tohouse his company Brown Shipley & Co. The architect was Liverpool alderman JamesAllanson Picton.

William Brown declared his origins in his coat of arms above the door. He was born inBallymena, and a Red Hand of Ulster surmounts it. His family lived in the USA, andAmerican and British flags flank the coat of arms.


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Two photos of William Brown at the laying of the foundation stone for the newmuseum and library building that he financed, on 15 April 1857 (courtesy of LiverpoolLibraries).

The new museum and library building was opened by William Brown on 18 October1860. Though the portico is now approached by a large flight of steps, originally it was on ahuge terrace high above the street.


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Properties on Shaw’s Brow were demolished to make way for the museum and library, andit was renamed William Brown Street (courtesy of Liverpool Libraries).

When the museum opened houses, shops and pubs still stood at the bottom of WilliamBrown Street. The 1860 museum building is on the right.


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Seated on the right is the museums first curator, Thomas John Moore (1824-1892). Seatedon the left is Liverpool councillor and museum enthusiast Rev. Henry Hugh Higgins(1814-1893).

In 1884 the museum launched aschools’ loan service, the first in anymuseum

Rev. Henry Hugh Higgins became the firstpresident of the Museums Association when it wasfounded in 1890.


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An extension to the museum was opened in 1906. It had two great ‘Horseshoe’ galleries,and beneath it were three floors of Liverpool’s Central Technical School.

Don Pedro, the elephant, arrived at the museum from Barnum and Bailey’s circus in 1898 andwas shown in the Upper Horseshoe gallery from 1906 till 1941.


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As the museum extension was built St John’s Gardens were constructed on the other sideof the road and William Brown Street was remodelled. Tramlines went down and thelong flight of steps to the museum portico went in (courtesy of Liverpool Libraries).

The museum extension completed the run of civic buildings on the south side of WilliamBrown Street.


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New displays in the 1920s and 1930s included Ancient Egypt, and African masks.


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Elaine Tankard worked at the museum in various jobs from 1930 until 1966. She was‘acting director’ on several occasions and instigated many innovations, including a Children’sCorner (above).


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Douglas Allan (left) was museum director from 1929 until 1945. R. Kempton Perry(right) started in the museum before the first World War and was acting director for a fewyears when Allan left.

The museum’s staff in about 1932. Director Douglas Allan is seated in the middle withElaine Tankard to his left.


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The main hall of the museum before and after a bomb hit in May 1941.

The Horseshoe Galleries (left) were damaged by the bomb in 1941, but were repaired andreopened in 1955. The old museum building needed to be rebuilt and did not reopen until1966.


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After the war museum staff and collections were moved to Carnatic Hall in south Liverpool.The view of Carnatic Hall Top left is by Allan Peel Tankard, Elaine Tankard’s brother.


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Temporary steps (towards the left) led to a part of the museum that reopened after the war in1956 (courtesy of Liverpool Libraries).

While part of the museum reopened, the 1860s building stood in ruins until the 1960s. Right –museum director Tom Hume sees rebuilding begin in 1963.


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In April 1963 when the Earl of Derby (centre) unveiled a plaque to commemorate the start ofrebuilding the museum he toured the natural history section and saw volunteer SusannaDavey skinning a rook. Museum director Tom Hume is on the left.

In 1963 work started on planning therebuilding of the parts of the museumdestroyed in the blitz.

A segment of the roof of the Planetarium is slidinto place. The Planetarium opened to the publicin May 1970.


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In 1987 the museum’s Natural History Centre opened - the first hands-on centre in amuseum.

The Museum’s Aquarium first opened in 1857, the second public aquarium in the .world.


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The Space gallery opened in 1993.

29 April 2005 – Loyd Grossman, chair of the Board of Trustees of National MuseumsLiverpool, opens up a new extension and a new entrance at the museum. It is renamed WorldMuseum Liverpool.


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In 2008 Liverpool was European Capital of Culture, and the museum attracted 787,767visits, more than in any other year in its long history.In 2010 the museum has been on William Brown Street for 150 years, and celebrates theanniversary of the year that William Brown handed over the museum and library building toLiverpool.